Middle Chinese can be divided into an early period, generally called Early Middle Chinese, and a later period, Late Middle Chinese. The transition point between Early and Later Middle Chinese is thought to be during the Mid-Tang Dynasty and is indicated by phonological developments. For example, in the rime bookQieyun, bilabialinitials[p pʰ b m] characters are shown, but there were no labiodental initials like f and v, which can be found in Jiyun. This indicates that a sound change in the pronunciation of Chinese occurred in the four centuries after the appearance of Qieyun.
The reconstruction of Middle Chinese by different modern linguists varies slightly, but the differences are minor and fairly uncontroversial, indicating that Middle Chinese phonology is now fairly well understood and accepted. (Middle) Chinese is not written using an alphabetic script, therefore, sounds cannot be derived directly from writing. The sounds of Middle Chinese must therefore be inferred from a number of sources:
Preserved pronunciation of Chinese characters in borrowed Chinese vocabulary surviving in non-Chinese languages such as Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese
Transliterations of foreign words into Chinese characters. For example, "Dravida" was translated by religious scribes into a series of characters 達羅毗荼 that are now read in Putonghua (Mandarin) as /ta35 luo35 phi35 thu35/ (Pinyin: Dáluópítú). This suggests that Mandarin /uo/ (Pinyin -uo) is the modern reflex of an ancient /a/-like sound, and that the Mandarin tone /35/ is a reflex of ancient voiced consonants. Both of these can in fact be confirmed through comparison among modern Chinese dialects.
Rime books (or rime dictionaries). Ancient Chinese philologists devoted a great amount of effort in summarizing the Chinese phonetic system through rime or rhyme books. There was a profuse output of Chinese poetry during the Tang era, with a rigid verse structure that relied on the rime and tone of the final characters in lines of poetry. Middle Chinese as embodied in rime books were a primary aid to authors in composing poetry. The 601 AD Qieyun rime dictionary is our earliest fixed record of the phonology of Chinese pronunciation, albeit without the aid of phonetic letters, but entries that are indexed under a rigorous hierarchy of tone, rime, and onset. Only fragments or incomplete copies were known until a chance discovery of a version from the Tang Dynasty in the caves of Dunhuang. Later expanded rime dictionaries such as the eleventh-century Song Dynasty Guangyun and Jiyun survive to the present day. These are essentially extended versions of the Qieyun, and until the Dunhuang discovery, the Guangyun was the base from which Middle Chinese was reconstructed.
Reconstructed phonology
Middle Chinese had three types of stops: voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated. Syllables could end with stops. Middle Chinese had more vowels than its descendants, such as /æ/, which merged into similar phonemes later on. Affricate and fricative sibilants had three levels of distinction as they do in Mandarin. Some Sinologistswho? believe that Old Chinese or an early state of Middle Chinese originally had consonant clusters such as /dɹ/ which became retroflex sounds.
Further reading
Chen, C.-Y. (2001). Tonal evolution from pre-Middle Chinese to modern Pekinese: three tiers of changes and their intricacies. Berkeley, CA: Project on Linguistic Analysis, University of California.
Newman, J., & Raman, A. V. (1999). Chinese historical phonology: a compendium of Beijing and Cantonese pronunciations of characters and their derivations from Middle Chinese. LINCOM studies in Asian linguistics, 27. Muenchen: LINCOM Europa. ISBN 3895865435
Ulving, T., & Karlgren, B. (1997). Dictionary of old and middle Chinese: Bernhard Karlgren's Grammata serica recensa alphabetically arranged. Orientalia Gothoburgensia, 11. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. ISBN 9173462942
Pulleyblank, E. G. (1991). Lexicon of reconstructed pronunciation in early Middle Chinese, late Middle Chinese, and early Mandarin. Vancouver: UBC Press. ISBN 0774803665
Pulleyblank, E. G. (1984). Middle Chinese: a study in historical phonology. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. ISBN 0774801921
