Thread by @ZevHandel

Ready to pick this up again? I am. I wrote this thread a few days ago, and I left a few unanswered questions.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1360448134392868866

Here's the first unanswered question. It's an important one. We're not used to seeing a change in the written form of a Chinese word that has a clear, continuous history.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1360458595217772546

The pronunciation of Chinese words has changed a great deal over the last three millennia, but there is nothing special about Chinese in this regard. Equally dramatic pronunciations take place over that time span in any language.

Just to give one trivial example. In the roughly 2,000 years it took for modern French to develop from vulgar Latin, the word meaning 'eight' changed from "octō" /oktoː/ into "huit" /ɥit/. That's a big change!

The sound changes in Chinese are less visible to us because the spoken pronunciations have shifted while the written forms have remained mostly unchanged. This means we can’t easily see the pronunciation shift just from examining written records.

I mentioned in the last thread that 我 was ŋâiʔ in Old Chinese and became wǒ in Mandarin, but its written representation 我 was invariant.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1360458593988870145

This isn’t just because Chinese is written logographically, although that's part of the story. The same phenomenon can be seen, albeit to a lesser degree, in alphabetic writing systems, especially conservative ones like English.

In all languages, pronunciations change from generation to generation, but there is a societal advantage to maintaining stability in written forms even as the pronunciations shift. This creates powerful pressure against changing written forms to keep up with speech.

Consider the written English word “knight”, which looks rather bizarre as an alphabetic representation of /naɪt/. But the spelling makes sense when we understand that the word was once pronounced /knɪçt/ (with “gh” writing the fricative /ç/ sound).

A slew of sound changes happened over several hundred years as Middle English developed into Modern English: the /ç/ sound disappeared and the preceding short /ɪ/ became a long /iː/; the /k/ dropped before /n/; and in the Great Vowel Shift the long /iː/ became the diphthong /aɪ/.

And all the while, as /knɪçt/ gradually morphed into /naɪt/, the written form “knight” remained serenely unaffected.

Similarly—but over even longer stretches of time—Chinese words have changed pronunciation without changing written form. For example, the word ‘eat’ written as 食 changed from something like mlək to ʒək to dʒək to Mandarin shí and Cantonese sik6 … and is still written 食.

So back to the first one of our unanswered questions. If the Old Chinese word neʔ 爾 ‘you’ changed to later nəʔ and then to Mandarin nǐ, why isn’t it written 爾?

The answer lies in the fact that the pronunciation didn’t just shift. It split. The reduced pronunciation supplanted the fully stressed pronunciation in vernacular speech, but the fully stressed pronunciation remained as a scholastic reading of the character 爾 in written texts.

Now, we don’t know the exact early history of the word nǐ. We don’t know exactly where, how, and when the reduced form ended up displacing the full form in spoken language. But by the late Tang it seems that this change had happened in the spoken language of northern China.

The word for “you” had bifurcated, into a spoken form that people used when talking, and a character pronunciation used by educated people when reading the character 爾 aloud.

Eventually, the spoken word became distinct enough that it was no longer recognized as the same word written by 爾. In Tang dynasty texts reflecting vernacular spoken language (not those written Classical Chinese), a new character was employed to represent the "new" spoken word.

Next time we'll explore the origins of that character.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1360459970513313798

Thread continues here:

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1362273313683165191