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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.
Although Old Chinese is known from written records beginning around 1200 BC, the logographic script provides much more indirect and partial information about the pronunciation of the language than alphabetic systems used elsewhere.
The Old National Pronunciation (traditional Chinese: 老國音; simplified Chinese: 老国音; pinyin: lǎo guóyīn) was the system established for the phonology of standard Chinese as decided by the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation from 1913 onwards, and published in the 1919 edition of the Guóyīn Zìdiǎn (國音字典, "Dictionary of National Pronunciation").
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 ...
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. [a] The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty.
Efforts to reconstruct Old Chinese pronunciation began relatively recently. Literary Chinese is not read with a reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation; instead, it is read with the pronunciations as categorized and listed in a rime dictionary originally based upon the Middle Chinese pronunciation in Luoyang between the 2nd and 4th centuries.
The Old Chinese voiceless lateral and nasal initials yielded a * tʰ initial in eastern dialects and * x in western ones. [34] [35] By the Eastern Han, the Old Chinese voiced lateral had also evolved to * d or * j, depending on syllable type. [36] The gap was filled by Old Chinese * r, which yielded Eastern Han * l and Middle Chinese l. [37]
The national pronunciation approved by the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was later customarily called the Old National Pronunciation (老國音). Although declared to be based on Beijing pronunciation, it was actually a hybrid of northern and southern pronunciations.