Fanqie
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Hiragana | はんせつ | ||||||||||||||||||
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Fanqie (Chinese:
History
[edit]Early dictionaries such as the Erya (3rd century BC) indicated the pronunciation of a character by the dúruò (讀若, "read as") method, giving another character with the same pronunciation.[1] The introduction of Buddhism to China around the 1st century brought Indian phonetic knowledge, which may have inspired the idea of fanqie.[1] According to the 6th-century scholar Yan Zhitui, fanqie were first used by Sun Yan (
The oldest extant sources of significant bodies of fanqie are fragments of the original Yupian (544 AD) found in Japan and the Jingdian Shiwen, a commentary on the classics that was written in 583 AD.[5][6] The method was used throughout the Qieyun, a Chinese rhyme dictionary published in 601 AD during the Sui dynasty.[2][7] When Classical Chinese poetry flowered during the Tang dynasty, the Qieyun became the authoritative source for literary pronunciations. Several revisions and enlargements were produced, the most important of which was the Guangyun (1007–1008). Even after the more sophisticated rime table analysis was developed, fanqie continued to be used in dictionaries, including the voluminous Kangxi Dictionary, published in 1716, and the Ciyuan and Cihai of the 1930s.[8][9]
During the Qing dynasty, some bilingual Chinese-Manchu dictionaries had the Manchu words phonetically transcribed with Chinese characters. The book
Function
[edit]![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a8/Qieyun_Dong_entry_fanqie.svg/130px-Qieyun_Dong_entry_fanqie.svg.png)
In the fanqie method, a character's pronunciation is represented by two other characters. The onset (initial consonant) is represented by that of the first of the two characters (
In the rhyme dictionaries, there was a tendency to choose pairs of characters that agree on the presence or absence of a palatal medial -j-, but there was no such tendency for the rounded medial -w-, which was represented solely in the final character.[13] There was also a strong tendency to spell words with labial initials using final characters with labial initials.[14]
The third character
Analysis
[edit]Fanqie provide information about the sounds of earlier forms of Chinese, but its recovery is not straightforward. Several characters could be used for each initial or final, and in particular, no character was ever used to spell itself.
However, it is possible to identify the initials and the finals underlying a large and consistent collection of fanqie by using a method that was first used by the Cantonese scholar Chen Li, in his 1842 study of the Guangyun.[16] For example, in that dictionary,
東 was spelled德 +紅 ,德 was spelled多 +特 , and多 was spelled德 +河 .
That implies that
Chen's method can be used to identify the categories of initials and finals, but not their sound values, for which other evidence is required.[16] Thus, Middle Chinese has been reconstructed by Karlgren and later scholars by comparing those categories with Sino-Xenic pronunciations and the pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese.[20]
Effects of sound change
[edit]The method described the pronunciations of characters in Middle Chinese, but the relationships have been obscured as the language evolved into the modern varieties over the last millennium and a half. Middle Chinese had four tones, and initial plosives and affricates could be voiced, aspirated or voiceless unaspirated. Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch, and by the late Tang dynasty, each of the tones had split into two registers (traditionally known as yīn
For example, the characters of formula
That effect sometimes led to a form of spelling pronunciation. Chao Yuen Ren cited the example of the character
Use in Cantonese
[edit]In Cantonese, fanqie can be found in some dictionaries to this day, often alongside other romanization system or phonetic guides, to indicate the pronunciation of characters lacking a homophone.
For example, in the Sun Ya dictionary the character
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ a b c Casacchia (2006), p. 359.
- ^ a b c Chu (1990).
- ^ a b c d Branner (2000), p. 38.
- ^ Pulleyblank (1999), p. 105.
- ^ Pulleyblank (1984), p. 144.
- ^ Baxter (1992), p. 40.
- ^ Casacchia (2006), p. 360.
- ^ a b Chao (1961), p. 173.
- ^ Yong & Peng (2008), p. 39.
- ^ Yong & Peng (2008), p. 397.
- ^ Casacchia (2006), pp. 359–360.
- ^ Wang (1980).
- ^ Chao (1941), pp. 205–207, 215.
- ^ Chao (1941), pp. 217–218.
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 27.
- ^ a b c Norman (1988), p. 28.
- ^ Baxter & Sagart (2014), p. 10.
- ^ Pulleyblank (1984), pp. 142–143.
- ^ Pulleyblank (1984), p. 142.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp. 34–37.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp. 34–36, 52–54.
- ^
何 容 (1985).新 雅 中 文字 典 . Hong Kong: Sun Ya Publications. ISBN 9789620811883. - ^
麥 耘,譚 步 雲 (2018).實用 廣州 話 分類 詞 典 . Hong Kong:商務 印 書 館 . ISBN 9789620703058.
Works cited
[edit]- Baxter, William H. (1992), A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-012324-1.
- Baxter, William H.; Sagart, Laurent (2014), Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-994537-5.
- Branner, David Prager (2000), "The Suí–Táng tradition of Fǎnqiè phonology", in Auroux, Sylvain; Koerner, Konrad; Niederehe, Hans-Josef; Versteegh, Kees (eds.), History of the Language Sciences, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 36–46, ISBN 978-3-11-011103-3.
- Casacchia, G. (2006), "Chinese Linguistic Tradition", in Brown, Keith (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 2 (2nd ed.), London: Elsevier, pp. 358–362, ISBN 978-0-08-035943-4.
- Chao, Yuen Ren (1941), "Distinctions within Ancient Chinese", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 5 (3/4): 203–233, doi:10.2307/2717913, JSTOR 2717913.
- ——— (1961), "What is correct Chinese?", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 81 (3): 171–177, doi:10.2307/595651, JSTOR 595651. Reprinted as Chao, Yuen Ren (1976), "What is correct Chinese?", Aspects of Chinese sociolinguistics: essays by Yuen Ren Chao, Stanford University Press, pp. 72–83, ISBN 978-0-8047-0909-5.
- Chu, Chia-Ning 竺家
寧 (1990), Shēngyùn xué聲 韻 學 [Phonology], Taipei:五 南 圖書 . (This book pointed out that use of fanqie appeared as early as Eastern Han.) - Norman, Jerry (1988), Chinese, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3.
- Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (1984), Middle Chinese: a study in historical phonology, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, ISBN 978-0-7748-0192-8.
- ——— (1999), "Chinese traditional phonology", Asia Major, 12 (2): 101–137, JSTOR 41645549.
- Wang, Li (1980), Hànyǔ shǐgǎo
漢語 史 稿 [History of the Chinese language], ISBN 978-7-101-01553-9. - Yong, Heming; Peng, Jing (2008), Chinese lexicography: a history from 1046 BC to AD 1911, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-156167-2.