Estudio de las Áreas y Zonas 1 Área

The raw data used i n this project comes from the Pronouncing Dictionary of

( 1962) . This is a comparative dialectological dictionary which records, in mod­ ified IPA (called DOCIPA), the pronunciation of 2714 characters in seventeen Chinese dialects covering all the major dialect groups in mainland China. In

addition to the pronunciation in contemporary Chinese dialects, the Zihui also

gives information on how each morpheme was pronounced in Middle Chinese.

The data for this comes from the Qie yun and the data for the dialects from

the 1956-58 dialect survey undertaken by the Government of China.

The Zihui itself was published in 1962. All the data in Zihui has since been computerised under the direction of William S-Y. Wang at the University of California, Berkeley. This resulted in the DOC, 'Dictionary On Computer' , from which we have easy access t o a large amount o f comparative information and statistics. 1 Streeter {1977) gives a comprehensive description of the DOC and its contents. An informal and fascinating account of the development of

the DOC between 1966 and 1993 at Berkeley is given by Cheng ( 1 994a) . The DOC seeded prolific research in historical and comparative Chinese linguistics, some even before its completion. Reports of many of these were published as interim progress reports of the phonology laboratory at Berkeley, titled MIMs or Monthly Internal Memorandums; see ( Cheng 1 994a, p. 73) and Streeter ( 1977, p.102ff) for an account of these. But more importantly, the data in DOC has continued to be useful and viable up till today. Recent studies in Chinese phonology that have used the DOC, other than Chen76, CN84 or the present work include Newman ( 1 994) which attempts to explain the unexpected occurrence of the high front rounded vocalic reflex - y in Wenzhou and New­ man ( 1996) which is an account of exceptions where the Chinese philological tradition took precedence over the comparative method of modern linguistics in Middle Chinese reconstruction.

In 1989, a second edition of the Zihui was published. There have been some corrections to errors in the first edition and also some significant updates 1The DOC also indicates for each entry whether it is a literary or non-literary pronunciation in the dialect concerned. In the case of the Beijing and Cantonese data, there are very few instances of a literary /non-literary distinction (less than 10 in 2714) . In such cases non-literary versions have been chosen for this project.

- information about 3 more dialects has been included and the number of

Chinese characters used as the basis for the transcription has increased from 2722 to 296 1 .2 However, its electronic mirror in the DOC has yet to catch up. Meanwhile, studies that have required a computerised database such as the DOC have used mainly the first edition, and those that didn't have used the second. This study uses DOC93 which is the 1993 edition of DOC based on the first edition of Zihui.

4.4 Motivation

Why was the method of this thesis applied to the Chinese language family as opposed to, say, the Indo-European or Austronesian families? This question is begging to be asked, especially since the example in Chapter 3 illustrated the method by its application to the Germanic family of languages. In fact, the original intention was to continue work within the Germanic family. To this end, the possibility of collaborative work was investigated with Professor Joseph Voyles of the department of Germanics, University of Washingon, Seat­ tie. Voyles himself welcomed the idea after having read a preliminary version of Raman and Patrick ( 1997c) .3 However, practical difficulties in this collabo­ ration soon surfaced since he did not have access to the Internet and all cor- respondence had to be routed via the postal system. Besides, the data for the Germanic family was rather limited in quantity. Although the Voyles hypoth­ esis of diachronic phonology between early and later Germanic languages was available, an authoritative corpus of data, namely a significant number of recon­ structed *LNWG forms and their corresponding attestations in later Germanic, to which the hypothesis could be applied was lacking. These could no doubt have been constructed through collaboration with Voyles, but inevitable delays in correspondence through the postal system introduced difficulties. Thus this

20nly 2714 of the 2722 forms stated to be represented were actually available for study in this project because of the absence of the corresponding reconstructed Middle Chinese forms in the Zihui.

3Personal communication with Professor Joseph Voyles: Correspondence regarding possible collaboration, in Letter dt. 12 Sep 1994.

option was given low priority.

One other option investigated was the use of a hypothetical language espe­ cially designed to test the proposed methodology. While this has the advantage of being easy and uncontroversial, the results would have been uninteresting and of little use, nor would they be verifiable against present linguistic knowl­ edge. The data would be purely illustrative and serve no other purpose. This had already been done using the artificially small Germanic dataset in Chap­ ter 3. At this point, it was decided to use the Chinese data which was available through John Newman at Massey University's Department of Linguistics and Second Language Teaching.

Why wasn't the Chinese data used to start with? Initially, before the methodology had taken shape, it had not yet been decided whether the method was to be purely illustrative or was to be applied to real data. Besides, at that point, the amount of data that would be needed had not been estimated, and it was assumed that a small sample of reconstructed words would be sufficient. While an awareness at that time of the availability of the Chinese data and pos-

sibility of using it was present, the investment in time and effort in learning the diachronic rules and their relative chronology coupled with the then unknown agreeability of this project among contemporary linguists elsewhere seemed to outweigh the advantages of using a real dataset. It was only after some initial work had been done and a preliminary publication had generated favorable sug­ gestions from reviewers that it became apparent the method required a large corpus of data in order to produce significant results.

Besides the ready availability of a large corpus of this data at a local site in electronic format4 , its use for this project had the following other advantages:

• Availability of a large and authoritative corpus of data (the Zihv.i) covering

a wide variety of sounds in various phonological contexts.

4The SMC reconstructions of the DOC forms, the IPA transcriptions of the SMC, Beijing and Cantonese forms and the English meanings of the characters had all been entered into a FilemakerPro database on an Apple Macintosh by Dr John Newman. It was initially exported using a Macintosh scripting language into Microsoft Excel. But since it was tedious to edit it using Excel, it was migrated into an ASCII _�'lEX table, where it currently resides.

• Availability of a set of diachronic laws from a single reconstruction to two

descendants presented in comparable format (Chen76 and CN84) .

• Easy accessibility for discussion of one of the authors of the C N84 hy­ pothesis, namely John Newman.

Although the Zihui has these advantages, it is not free of problems. How­

ever, it was decided to use it for this study as its shortcomings were far out­ weighed by the advantages of using it. Newman ( 1 994, p.334) states:

Admittedly the Zihui has its limitations: it is not as comprehensive

as one would like it to be nor does it include age and gender differ­ ences. Nevertheless, it is a solid database which allows some quan­ tification of historical changes and enables easy comparison with other Chinese dialects.

In the following sections, a further aspect of the motivation for using this data is presented - namely, the availability of a simplified reconstruction of Middle Chinese based on the Zihui with a comparable relative chronology for Modern Beijing and Modern Cantonese.