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"Old Chinese was a toneless language. Tones arose between Old Chinese and Early Middle Chinese (that is between 500 BCE and 500 CE) as a result of the loss of final laryngeals." The four tones of Middle Chinese, 平 píng level, 上 shǎng rising, 去 qù departing, and 入 rù entering, all
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the Qieyun, a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions.
The phonological system that is implicit in the rime dictionaries and analysed in the rime tables is known as Middle Chinese, and is the traditional starting point for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. Some authors distinguish the two layers as Early and Late Middle Chinese respectively.
Middle Chinese had a structure much like many modern varieties, with largely monosyllabic words, little or no derivational morphology, four tone-classes (though three phonemic tones), and a syllable structure consisting of initial consonant, glide, main vowel and final consonant, with a large number of initial consonants and a fairly small number of final consonants.
Each of these is disputed to some extent, and many scholars doubt that the system corresponds to any single form of speech. The custom in Chinese scholarship is to neutrally describe a syllable with a string of six characters identifying its 攝 shè, whether it is 開 kāi or 合 hé, the division, tone, Guangyun rime and initial.
Middle Chinese, or more precisely Early Middle Chinese, is the phonological system of the Qieyun, a rhyme dictionary published in 601, with many revisions and expansions over the following centuries. These dictionaries set out to codify the pronunciations of characters to be used when reading the classics .
Li addressed some of the criticisms of Karlgren's system, revising some initials and distinguishing finals that Karlgren had combined. [12] Although Karlgren's view of Middle Chinese as a single spoken variety is no longer widely held, his transcription, as revised by Li, is still widely used as a notation for the Qieyun categories. [13]
In Middle Chinese, the phonological system of medieval rime dictionaries and rime tables, the final is the rest of the syllable after the initial consonant. This analysis is derived from the traditional Chinese fanqie system of indicating pronunciation with a pair of characters indicating the sounds of the initial and final parts of the syllable respectively, though in both cases several ...