Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:Woods wrote:And about the phonetic component - do you know if it tells you always the end of the syllable, or the beginning, or it can be both? It has nothing to do with the tone but only the vowels, or something like that?
So it pretty much always tells you the
rhyme (i.e. the syllable minus the initial consonant)
Excluding the tone or was it that two thousand years ago the tones were different?
Excluding the tone, as you said already. You can see this from the phonetic series: the tonal differences arose from differences in initial consonant (voiced vs unvoiced) and in final consonants. Note, for instance, how 調 has three different reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciations listed: *dɯːw, *dɯːws, and *tɯw. Each of these corresponds to a different modern pronunciation: respectively, tiáo, diào, and zhōu.
I find this very odd since the tone is supposedly an essential part of the syllable.
It is
now; it wasn't when the Chinese writing system was first created. Chinese--like many other languages--has undergone a process of
tonogenesis by which lexical tone developed from other sounds.
Woods wrote:No idea how these Old Chinese transcriptions were pronounced, but if they were different, wouldn't then the rhyme be different and need a different phonetic component for each variation?
The system was never meant to be perfect and exhaustive. The phonetic elements are just hints to help speakers guess which character was meant. There used to be a good deal more variation. A lot of variants were eliminated in the standardisation of the script under Shihuangdi; others have been abandoned more recently.
Woods wrote:So the tones were the evolution of different final consonants? Interesting. I heard something similar about Tibetan recently - that they write countless consonants that don't get pronounced (a little bit like French), but when the reader sees them, they know that they should pronounce the preceding vowel differently (talking about vowel quality, not tone).
Tonogenesis is what's called an
area feature in this part of the world. Standard Tibetan developed it (there are still varieties of Tibetan which are not tonal), as did Vietnamese, Burmese, and Thai. Thai script is like Tibetan script in that it was created before tonongenesis has begun (or was just in its early stages). It now has many consonants which are pronounced exactly the same but are associated with different tones on the following syllables.
Chinese tonogenesis is a bit more complex than Thai or Tibetan because
both the initial consonants
and the final consonants play a role in determining what the tone of a syllable will be. Originally, there were eight tonal categories, based on two classes of initials and four classes of finals. Standard Mandarin simplified these eight categories to four; Standard Cantonese expanded them to ten (according to some accounts; according to others, there are really only six underlying tones with ten different phonetic realisations).
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons