Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese (Zhonggu Hanyu 中古漢語) is a stage in the development of the Chinese language and used as label for this phase roughly corresponding to the period in Chinese history from Northern and Southern Dynasties (NanBei Chao) through the reunification under Sui, then Tang, and Song dynasties (7th through 10th centuries A.D.).

The 切韻 'Qieyun' rime book(A.D. 601) (by Lu Fayan et al.)is our earliest fixed record of the phonology of Chinese pronunciation, albeit without the aid of phonetic letters, but entries that are indexed under a rigorous hierachy of tone, rime, and onset. Only fragments or incomplete copies have survived until a chance discovery of a version of it from the Tang Dynasty in the caves of Dunhuang. Later expanded rime dictionaries such as the eleventh century Song Dynasty 廣韻 'Guangyun' and 'Jiyun' rimebooks survive to the present day. The latter being essentially extended versions of Qieyun, and until the Dunhuang discovery, Guangyun was the base from which Middle Chinese was reconstructed.

Middle Chinese can be divided into an early period, generally called Early Middle Chinese, and a later period, Late Middle Chinese. The transition point between Early and Later Middle Chinese is thought to be during the Mid-Tang Dynasty and is indicated by the phonological developments. For example, in Qieyun, bilabial initial [p pʰ b m] characters are shown, but there were no labialdental initials like f and v in Qieyun, but which could be found in Jiyun. This indicates that a phonological change in the pronunciation of Chinese had occured.

When western linguists became interested in historical Chinese phonology, various names were given to this general phase of the development of Chinese. Bernhard Karlgren for instance, called what we now call the Middle Chinese phase as 'Ancient Chinese'.

The reconstruction of Middle Chinese phonology is based on several sources: modern Chinese dialects, the preserved pronunciation of Chinese characters in borrowed Chinese vocabulary surviving in non-Chinese languages such as Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, riming dictionaries, and translations of non-Chinese words using Chinese characters. The reconstruction between modern linguists may vary slightly, but they are minor differences, and fairly uncontroversial, so we could say the Middle Chinese phonology is fairly well understood and accepted.

Just as Proto-Indo-European can be reconstructed from modern Indo-European languages, so can Middle Chinese be reconstructed (very tentatively) from modern dialects. In addition, ancient Chinese philologists devoted great amount of effort in summarizing the Chinese phonetic system through "rhyming tables", and these tables serve as a basis for the work of modern linguists. Finally, Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words often provide clues. For example, "Dravida" was translated by religious scribes into a series of characters 達羅毗荼 that are now read in Mandarin Chinese as /ta35 lwo35 phi35 thu35/. This suggests that Mandarin] /wo/ is the modern reflexes of an ancient /a/-like sound, and that the Mandarin tone /35/ is a reflex of ancient voiced consonants. Both of these can in fact be confirmed through comparison among modern Chinese dialects.