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The phonology of Standard Chinese has historically derived from the Beijing dialect of Mandarin.However, pronunciation varies widely among speakers, who may introduce elements of their local varieties.
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic ...
Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese from documentary evidence. Although the writing system does not describe sounds directly, shared phonetic components of the most ancient Chinese characters are believed to link words that were pronounced similarly at that time.
Chinese phonology is covered by the following articles: Concerning modern Chinese: Standard Chinese phonology; Cantonese phonology; For the phonology of other varieties of Chinese, see the articles on the particular varieties; For an overview, see Varieties of Chinese → Phonology; Concerning pre-modern Chinese: Historical Chinese phonology
They correspond to the phonology of Middle Chinese, and are named even or level (平 píng), rising (上 shǎng), departing or going (去 qù), and entering or checked (入 rù). [2] The last three are collectively referred to as oblique 仄 ( zè ), an important concept in poetic tone patterns .)
William H. Baxter's monograph A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology displaced Li's reconstruction in the 1990s. Baxter did not produce a dictionary of reconstructions, but the book contains a large number of examples, including all the words occurring in rhymes in the Shijing , and his methods are described in great detail.
A Chinese vowel diagram or Chinese vowel chart is a schematic arrangement of the vowels of the Chinese language, which usually refers to Standard Chinese.The earliest known Chinese vowel diagrams were made public in 1920 by Chinese linguist Yi Tso-lin with the publication of his Lectures on Chinese Phonetics, three years after Daniel Jones published the famous "cardinal vowel diagram" in 1917.
Chinese varieties have the greatest differences in their phonology, and to a lesser extent in vocabulary and syntax. Southern varieties tend to have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants.