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On the Rhyming of Old Chinese: A Statistical Study
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Wong, Tak-Sum |
| Copyright Year | 2007 |
| Abstract | The phonological system of Old Chinese has long been a mystery since the realisation of language evolution. The reason behind is not only the lack of inherited rhyming dictionaries, phonetic alphabets and audio recording devices in that era, but more importantly, the application of ideographic writing system, which provides a little phonetic information to each symbol. Consequently, the progress of study is far less productive than that of middle Chinese, let alone the other fields of Old Chinese, such as morphology. The pioneer who conducted systematic investigation in the phonological system of Old Chinese is Dun Yucai in the Qing dynasty. Simple descriptive statistics was applied to the rhymes in the “Classic of Poetry” for the categorisation of the ancient rhyming groups. The introduction of phonetic alphabets by Bernhard Karlgren provided means of estimating the phonetic values of the rhymes. Nevertheless, the categorisation of rhyming groups by verse is still an important step (Zhu 2006). On the study of rhyming, Luo Ch’ang-Pei, Zhou Zumo, et cetra applied descriptive statistics to test the merging of rhymes. However, the simple comparison of a fixed threshold to the ratio of rhyming distinctions weakens the objectiveness of the study. After that, Lu Zhiwei first applied inferential statistics to study the initials in Old Chinese by phonograms. Recently, Zhu (1989) made use inferential statistics and developed a model to study the rhyming in North Song dynasty. In Zhu’s study, “discrete index”, which is the ratio between the ratio of the rhyming of two suspected separated/mixed rhymes in the same rhyming group and that expected by chance, is applied to determine the probability of mixing rhymes. After that, null hypothesis is made and the “T-test”, which is a common statistical test, is used to verify the result. Similarly, the mixing of the rhyming groups can also be determined in a similar way. By applying inferential statistics on the verses, not only can the corpus be used as circumstantial evidence, but concrete evidence. In this way, the valuable historical documents can be fully utilised. In addition, the influence of random errors due to the writers and compilers can also be greatly reduced in the analysis. Present results on the reconstruction of Old Chinese are largely based on the phonetic components of the phonograms, Sino-Tibetan comparison and the distribution of elements in Middle Chinese. Recently, Baxter (1992) has also outlined a statistical model to study the rhyming of Old Chinese. However, with small amount of samples, binomial distribution may not be the best one to use. In this research, the model developed by Zhu was applied in the investigation of the categorisation of the Old Chinese rhyming so that the corpus — Classic of Poetry can be strictly and thoroughly utilised. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www4.lt.cityu.edu.hk/~tswong/index.files/Abstract%20-%20WONG%20TS.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
