Talk:Reconstructions of Old Chinese

Tones?

This page could do with some info about reconstructing tones in MC and OC. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.145.192.58 (talk) 09:27, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Baxter–Sagart needs to be generally intelligible

Section Baxter–Sagart (2014) is linked from {{Infobox Chinese}} in many articles related to ancient China. Sometimes, the transcription is unintelligible even to a reader with some knowledge of both IPA and the history of Chinese. For example, I just stumbled on the pronunciation "*lˤa[t]-s [ɢ]ʷ(r)aʔ" for - would you have guessed it? - 大禹. I clicked on the link, hoping to find an explanation of the various non-IPA signs, but did not find what I needed.

We should not force the average reader, who just wants to find out what a historic name might have sounded like, to work through all the discipline-specific details of this section. All they need is some help both with IPA and the peculiarities of historical linguistics notation. The asterisk might be known, but I'm probably not the only one who would need an explanation of the minus sign and the different parentheses.

So, I have two requests:

1. Can someone please explain the non-IPA signs to me?
2. Can we work on an explanation (either here or on a different page) for readers who want to roughly know what an ancient word sounded like?

— Sebastian 08:36, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

(pinging User:White whirlwind, who added that entry)

Baxter and Sagart use extra marks to indicate uncertainty in their reconstruction and their views on morphology. Thus [t] stands for either t or something else with the same Middle Chinese reflex in this context, (r) means r may or may not have been present, and -s indicates an original suffix. They suggest that for a general audience the brackets and parenthesized elements could be omitted, so the above would become "*lˤats ɢʷaʔ". Perhaps such forms would be a better fit for |oc-bs= fields of infoboxes. Note also that some elements of their construction are controversial, including the reconstruction of initial pharyngealized consonants where other authors reconstruct the absence of a following palatal glide. Kanguole 10:02, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply, which answers my question #1 and shows a good path towards solving #2. I agree that the general audience would better served with the purged forms. OTOH, it would be a pity to remove that information. There will likely be people who want to know such details. The best we can do for them would be to give them a reference pointing to source of the complete transliteration. Regarding ˤ, I'm surprised that research is so precise as to worry about this distinction, which I can easily imagine may have differed between speakers of the time, given that it is not phonemic.

The problem with the links from the infobox to this article is that this article is dedicated to historical linguistics and not, as most other articles linked from there, exclusively to the transcription. Short of creating a new article, maybe we could dedicate a subsection to "Baxter–Sagart as used in Wikipedia articles". That would also allow us to deviate from Baxter and Sagart in cases where the alternative transcription is easier to understand for the average reader. (This would follow Occam's razor and not be a problem for the advanced reader in the case of allophones or when they can check out the source.) — Sebastian 10:42, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Baxter and Sagart assume a phonemic distinction in OC between lˤ and l (and similarly for every other initial consonant), e.g. *lˤats > dà 'big' vs *lats > xiè 'leak, ooze'. Other authors reconstruct the same distinction as l and lj respectively. For example, in Baxter (1992) the above would be something like "*lats ɦʷjaʔ". So there are no allophones for Occam to remove – if there were a separate article, it wouldn't need to describe a Wikipedia-specialized version. Kanguole 12:07, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, I now see that this was a misunderstanding. I had erroneously thought that B&S distinguished between lˤ and lj. Thus, the allophones I had in mind were lˤ and l. But since it is as you say we can only choose between the original B&S and the l-lj distinction by others. I would have a slight preference for the latter since in impression it occurs in more language the reader can relate to. — Sebastian 09:25, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Use reconstructions of Old Chinese for current learning purposes

Can reconstructions of Old Chinese be used to help today's learners of written standard Mandarin? some info. regarding that issue could be added --Backinstadiums (talk) 15:27, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Hello Backinstadiums, to add it to an article, we would need some reliable sources. If you didn't find anything elsewhere on the internet, then it may well be that it hasn't been studied yet. But maybe it can be at least of help for you if we write a bit about it here on the talk page. As for me, I felt a similar need, so I looked at General Chinese, which, as a side effect, also is optimized to be give you the pronunciation for non-Mandarin Chinese, as well. For me, coming from a language which employs a much richer variation of syllable codas than Mandarin, it felt more familiar, gave the words more of a personality and made them more memorable. — Sebastian 09:16, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Wang Li

Can someone please add information about the phonetic interpretation of each of the 31 rhyme categories that Wang Li had in mind? This article treats him like a Qing philologist rather than someone who lived considerably longer than Karlgren. --Tibetologist (talk) 20:50, 12 July 2020 (UTC)