由漢語皆吳語之關係 看古韻書內 聲母字之分類 From the Relationship between Ho-Loh and Go to the Classification of Consonant Characters in Ancient Rhyme Dictionaries

Abstract

Statistical methods were used to study the relationship between the languages of Go and Ho-Loh. The results show how Go derived the pronunciation of the Han’s characters. The results also show that since some pronunciations were unnatural to the language, Go has gone through some transformations toward its natural state of being a soft spoken language. Different approaches and stages of the transformations had created various dialects. From the contingency tables of the consonants between the two languages, it can be seen clearly how the rhyme dictionaries classified the consonant characters. The earlier classifications were based on an ancient form of Go when the pronunciations were defined. The later ones modified the previous classifications in order to adapt the changes of pronunciations in Go. Even though the rhyme dictionaries were developed based on Go, the classifications did add a few classes, which were unnecessary to Go, but critical to preserve, for the most part, the original structure of the consonant classes in Han. In this way, the consonant characters represent the classes of the cross-classification between the two languages. The characters did not represent the consonant classes of a single language alone. Thus, for each of the languages, a certain character could represent quite different consonants. The conclusion is contradictory to a popular notion among Chinese linguists that each class represents a different consonant of the middle-ancient Han language.