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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 replac

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.

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.