13 ms·

The last point, about Ancient Greek read in the "modern" pronunciation (with Φ, Χ, Θ read as fricatives rather than aspirated stops) reminds me of how Mandarin,

by gfaure 5y ago

The last point, about Ancient Greek read in the "modern" pronunciation (with Φ, Χ, Θ read as fricatives rather than aspirated stops) reminds me of how Mandarin, which is how Chinese poetry is often read nowadays, is not great for representing the sounds of the poetry as written, since it's lost all final stops (-k, -t, -p) in closed syllables. Other topolects such as Cantonese preserved them, which makes it a better correspondence if you care about hearing something closer to the Middle Chinese that Tang poetry was composed in. How do we know so much about Middle Chinese pronunciation in the present day? Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME8wzyR6pO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME8wzyR6pO8 for a layperson's introduction.

mannerheim 5y ago
Depends on when the poetry was written. Classical Chinese was in use for over two thousand years, with the written Mandarin-based vernacular Chinese only replacing it in the last century. So later poetry (e.g. during the Qing) may not have been written with Middle Chinese pronunciation in mind. For example, the somewhat (in)famous poem, 'Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den' consisting entirely of homophones in modern standard Mandarin was written in the 1930s, so the poem was certainly written with Mandarin pronunciation in mind.
- retrac 5y ago
  It's hard to overstate the intellectual puzzle this is! Classical Chinese scholarship had a developed body of proto-linguistics, including rime spelling, a system for phonetic transcription and analysis, which transcribed sounds using Chinese characters purely phonetically. It was used to indicate the pronunciation of characters, as well as foreign words in bilingual dictionaries and so on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie The problem is, it's mostly self-referential. As the Wikipedia example gives, we don't precisely know how 東 was pronounced in 1000 AD from a fanqie dictionary entry. It would tell us something like that 東 (dong1 in Mandarin or dung1 in Cantonese today) was pronounced in the author's time like the initial consonant in 德 (de2, dak) with a closing syllable pronounced like 紅 (hong2, hung4). And of course, a dictionary from a thousand years before that, or even just from a speaker on the other side of China, might give a different entry... If you collect all the known fanqie pronunciations given in all the eras from all the probable sister languages, and especially when you start comparing with our knowledge of other languages (Japanese, Sanskrit, etc.) you can start to piece together the puzzle and get a rather good understanding of Chinese historical sound change. Chinese scholars back then were aware, on some level, of sound change, especially later in the Ming and Qing dynasties, but there was no general theory to address it, and the apparent contradictions in the ancient poetry and the old rime dictionaries were a source of a lot of perplexity.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    It's very interesting that at the same time written Chinese is terrible for pronunciation, even an absolutely beginner (that's not too young a child) must surely be more aware of etymology the concept. Perhaps I am biased, but to me it is a writing system that schemes "history!" unceasingly. It would make sense then if there was much earlier linguistics / folk etymologist, etc. in Chinese history. Whereas I didn't think think anything like modern linguistics got going until the enlightenment creation of the Classics' modern form.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Just because they were writing in Literary Chinese doesn't mean pronunciation was retained, or retained very well. Consider Mideval Latin and Church Latin "italianate" pronunciation. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_..., the poem was written by a linguist, so I don't think it it is representative of how most later writers of Literary Chinese thought pronunciation ought to work, but rather a reductio ad absurdum argument again writing in dead languages without using an alphabet.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
Why say 'topolect', and not just 'language'? I realize topolect is a translation of an official chinese term, but as far as I'm aware we're not Chinese officials. We're speaking English, and we can be brave enough to call mutually unintelligible languages what they are - languages. And before anyone gives me the 'language is a dialect with an army and a navy' - yes it's pithy but there's so many counter examples.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >We're speaking English, and we can be brave enough to call mutually unintelligible languages what they are - languages. I'm not super familiar with the specifics of Mandarin, so I could be wrong here, but it's quite common to come across English words that have fallen out of common use by native speakers but are adopted by non-native speakers as a vehicle for expressing a concept that exists in their native language but doesn't have a precise translation into English. Especially since they're talking about the evolution of Chinese pronunciation, "topolect", while jargon-y, seems to be a far more precise vehicle for expressing their sentiment.
  - magicsmoke 5y ago
    Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair as a translation of 方言 (fangyan) to get around the whole language/dialect bombshell when it comes to Chinese. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/topolect https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/topolect http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf It's a way to take 方言 and decouple it from linguistic terms like language and dialects so a proper study and classification of the Chinese language family and its various languages and dialects can take place without interference from Chinese politics. When someone points out that Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin are 方言 then linguists can nod politely, agree that they are in fact "topolects", then continue classifying them as Sinitic languages within the Sino-Tibetan language family each with their own collection of dialects. Would be interesting to know if the study of Arabic has similar issues because from a layman's cursory knowledge Arabic has similar diversity when it comes to mutual intelligibility.
dghughes 5y ago
Plays of Shakespeare is similar much of the rhymes and inside jokes are lost now due to modern pronunciation of old words. http://originalpronunciation.com/GBR/Home http://originalpronunciation.com/GBR/Home
- gfaure 5y ago
  Similarly, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, a young squire is described as conducting himself "in hope to stonden in his lady grace" (in the hopes of standing in his lady's grace). Some take this to be a bawdy anatomical pun, expressing the young man's hopes of 'standing' in his lady's 'grass' — a distinction lost nowadays that the pronunciation of "grace" and "grass" have grown so far apart. (Line 88 of Chaucer's General Prologue, https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/general-prologue-0 https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/general-prologue-0)

by gfaure 5y ago

mannerheim 5y ago

Depends on when the poetry was written. Classical Chinese was in use for over two thousand years, with the written Mandarin-based vernacular Chinese only replacing it in the last century. So later poetry (e.g. during the Qing) may not have been written with Middle Chinese pronunciation in mind. For example, the somewhat (in)famous poem, 'Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den' consisting entirely of homophones in modern standard Mandarin was written in the 1930s, so the poem was certainly written with Mandarin pronunciation in mind.

retrac 5y ago
It's hard to overstate the intellectual puzzle this is! Classical Chinese scholarship had a developed body of proto-linguistics, including rime spelling, a system for phonetic transcription and analysis, which transcribed sounds using Chinese characters purely phonetically. It was used to indicate the pronunciation of characters, as well as foreign words in bilingual dictionaries and so on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie The problem is, it's mostly self-referential. As the Wikipedia example gives, we don't precisely know how 東 was pronounced in 1000 AD from a fanqie dictionary entry. It would tell us something like that 東 (dong1 in Mandarin or dung1 in Cantonese today) was pronounced in the author's time like the initial consonant in 德 (de2, dak) with a closing syllable pronounced like 紅 (hong2, hung4). And of course, a dictionary from a thousand years before that, or even just from a speaker on the other side of China, might give a different entry... If you collect all the known fanqie pronunciations given in all the eras from all the probable sister languages, and especially when you start comparing with our knowledge of other languages (Japanese, Sanskrit, etc.) you can start to piece together the puzzle and get a rather good understanding of Chinese historical sound change. Chinese scholars back then were aware, on some level, of sound change, especially later in the Ming and Qing dynasties, but there was no general theory to address it, and the apparent contradictions in the ancient poetry and the old rime dictionaries were a source of a lot of perplexity.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  It's very interesting that at the same time written Chinese is terrible for pronunciation, even an absolutely beginner (that's not too young a child) must surely be more aware of etymology the concept. Perhaps I am biased, but to me it is a writing system that schemes "history!" unceasingly. It would make sense then if there was much earlier linguistics / folk etymologist, etc. in Chinese history. Whereas I didn't think think anything like modern linguistics got going until the enlightenment creation of the Classics' modern form.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Just because they were writing in Literary Chinese doesn't mean pronunciation was retained, or retained very well. Consider Mideval Latin and Church Latin "italianate" pronunciation. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_..., the poem was written by a linguist, so I don't think it it is representative of how most later writers of Literary Chinese thought pronunciation ought to work, but rather a reductio ad absurdum argument again writing in dead languages without using an alphabet.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

Why say 'topolect', and not just 'language'? I realize topolect is a translation of an official chinese term, but as far as I'm aware we're not Chinese officials. We're speaking English, and we can be brave enough to call mutually unintelligible languages what they are - languages. And before anyone gives me the 'language is a dialect with an army and a navy' - yes it's pithy but there's so many counter examples.

AussieWog93 5y ago
>We're speaking English, and we can be brave enough to call mutually unintelligible languages what they are - languages. I'm not super familiar with the specifics of Mandarin, so I could be wrong here, but it's quite common to come across English words that have fallen out of common use by native speakers but are adopted by non-native speakers as a vehicle for expressing a concept that exists in their native language but doesn't have a precise translation into English. Especially since they're talking about the evolution of Chinese pronunciation, "topolect", while jargon-y, seems to be a far more precise vehicle for expressing their sentiment.
- magicsmoke 5y ago
  Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair as a translation of 方言 (fangyan) to get around the whole language/dialect bombshell when it comes to Chinese. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/topolect https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/topolect http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf It's a way to take 方言 and decouple it from linguistic terms like language and dialects so a proper study and classification of the Chinese language family and its various languages and dialects can take place without interference from Chinese politics. When someone points out that Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin are 方言 then linguists can nod politely, agree that they are in fact "topolects", then continue classifying them as Sinitic languages within the Sino-Tibetan language family each with their own collection of dialects. Would be interesting to know if the study of Arabic has similar issues because from a layman's cursory knowledge Arabic has similar diversity when it comes to mutual intelligibility.

dghughes 5y ago

Plays of Shakespeare is similar much of the rhymes and inside jokes are lost now due to modern pronunciation of old words. http://originalpronunciation.com/GBR/Home http://originalpronunciation.com/GBR/Home

gfaure 5y ago
Similarly, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, a young squire is described as conducting himself "in hope to stonden in his lady grace" (in the hopes of standing in his lady's grace). Some take this to be a bawdy anatomical pun, expressing the young man's hopes of 'standing' in his lady's 'grass' — a distinction lost nowadays that the pronunciation of "grace" and "grass" have grown so far apart. (Line 88 of Chaucer's General Prologue, https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/general-prologue-0 https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/general-prologue-0)