Thread by @ZevHandel

It’s the fourth and final part of our mega-thread on the Chinese second-person pronoun ‘you’. Let’s get this done!

We’ve been exploring the historical relationship between the modern Mandarin word nǐ 你 and the Classical Chinese word 爾 (which is now pronounced ěr and was once pronounced *neʔ).

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

We’ve seen already that the spoken word nǐ is a colloquial descendant of the Old Chinese spoken word *neʔ. And we’ve seen that the right side of the written character 你 is an abbreviated form of the character 爾, and is also its modern simplified form 尔.

In other words, *neʔ 爾 turned into nǐ 你.

But if that’s the case, why do we read the character 爾 aloud as ěr in Mandarin? How could *neʔ 爾 turn into nǐ 你—but also turn into the very different syllable ěr 爾/尔? That’s our last unanswered question, and today we’re going to tackle it.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1360458828353966080

We saw earlier that nǐ is an irregular derivative of *neʔ. It’s not the result of regular patterns of sound change, but of an unstressed pronunciation that became the common Chinese spoken form by the Tang dynasty.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1360457331754950658

But the pronunciation *neʔ didn’t disappear. This fully stressed pronunciation of ‘you’ was still used when reading Classical Chinese texts aloud, and was codified in dictionaries as the reading of the character 爾.

This scholastic reading—“scholastic” meaning taught in school—survived as a literary form even as it was displaced in spoken language by the pronunciation that eventually became Mandarin nǐ.

And that literary pronunciation followed the regular patterns of sound change that affected the rest of the Chinese lexicon over the next 2,000 years.

If you think about it, er is an unusual Mandarin syllable. It doesn’t quite seem to fit the regular syllable structure of Mandarin. There are plenty of Mandarin syllables that end in -n, -ng, -i, and -u. But er is the only basic syllable that ends in -r.

The er syllables occurs in a few high-frequency words, so we can’t say it’s marginal in the phonological system. The most commonly occurring of these words are èr 二 ‘two’, ěrduo 耳朵 ‘ear’, and érzi 兒子/儿子 ‘child’.

So where does this peculiar, yet commonly-occurring, Mandarin syllable come from?

Well, it comes from Old Chinese syllables like *neʔ.

But the pathway is circuitous, and involves many sequenced sound changes. Let’s take a quick jaunt through 2,000 years of northern Chinese phonological history, shall we?

The first sound change is one that affected Old Chinese consonant *n- in about half the syllables in which it occurred (the so-called “Type B” syllables of Old Chinese, an explanation of which would take us too far afield today). In these syllables, it palatalized to *ɲ-.

(This palatal *ɲ- is the ñ sound of Spanish. It will strike the ears of English speakers as “ny”, but it’s a single consonant sound.)

This *ɲ- sound of Early Middle Chinese—spoken around the 6th century—was quite unstable. It developed in a lot of different directions in different Chinese languages. It is the source of nearly all occurrences of the modern Mandarin initial consonant r-, as in rén 人.

This excerpt from Hànyǔ Fāngyīn Zìhuì 汉语方音字汇 (Lexicon of Chinese Dialect Character Pronunciations) illustrates the incredible variety of changes that have affected this Early Middle Chinese *ɲ- in different Chinese languages and dialects.

In some, it disappeared or became a y-type sound (as in Cantonese jan4). In some, it became an ordinary n-, in others l-, and in still others a voiced fricative like z- or ʐ-. And it even ended up as a palatal nasal in others.

The shift of this sound in northern China from a nasal to a voiced fricative can be identified in the Go-on and Kan-on character readings of Japanese, which are borrowed from Chinese.

In the earlier Go-on pronunciation, Japanese has n-, reflecting Chinese *ɲ-. The Go-on reading of 人 is /nin/, as in the title of the classic Kurosawa film The Seven Samurai: Shichinin no Samurai 七人の侍.

The Kan-on pronunciation is /jin/. Borrowed from China just a few hundred years later, it shows that in Chinese the nasal had already turned into a fricative. You are probably familiar with this pronunciation in the Japanese word for ‘foreigner’, gaijin 外人.

By the time we get to the Late Middle Chinese of the Song dynasty, the initial consonant has become something pretty similar to the Modern Mandarin r-.

And this is when something really interesting happens! It only affects a small subset of the words that come from older *ɲ-. In fact, it only affects one syllable. Syllables with the pronunciation *ri—in any tone—begin changing into what ends up being Modern Mandarin er.

This change, *ri > er, is usually described as metathesis—a switching of the order of two sounds in a word. A nice example of metathesis in the history of English is the word “comfortable”.

You can see right there in the spelling of “comfortable” that the /r/ sound once came before the /t/ sound. And it still does in this word’s stem “comfort”. But in “comfortable”, the pronunciation of the /r/ and /t/ sounds have switched places: “comf-ter-ble”. That’s metathesis!

But in the case of Mandarin er syllables, it turns out that the appearance of metathesis is an illusion. There was an intermediate step in *ri > er in which the syllable *ri first lost its vowel entirely, becoming just an /r/ sound.

And then, some centuries later, a new vowel emerged *in front*, yielding our odd little friend er.

All of the Mandarin words that are today pronounced er went through this exact same process:

1. Early Middle Chinese (6th c.) *ɲiʔ
(> Japanese Go’on ni に)
2. Middle Chinese (8th c.) *ʒ̃í
(> Japanese Kan-on ji じ, Korean zi ᅀㅣ > i 이)

3. Late Middle Chinese (11th c.) *rí
4. Early Mandarin (14th c.) *ř
5. Modern Mandarin ěr

It’s a really wild series of sound changes! So that you can hear what these intermediate stages sound like, especially for those of you who can’t easily read the phonetic notation, I’ve made a little video of the pronunciations over time of 爾.

(One side note before we watch the video. You’ll notice most of these pronunciations are preceded by an asterisk *. That’s how historical linguists indicate that a reconstructed pronunciation is hypothetical, rather than directly attested. These are best guesses.)

And that’s why 爾 is today pronounced ěr, even though it is the direct ancestor of nǐ ‘you’.

Well, that finally brings us to the welcome end of this very convoluted exploration of a common word and its common written form, nǐ 你. /end (but see postscripts below)

Postscript 1 of 3: We lack direct evidence for the early developmental pathway of nǐ from *neʔ, because the word doesn’t appear in the written record or the lexicographic tradition until the medieval period—after it was already well established in the spoken language.

There are competing hypotheses about how it developed out of Old Chinese *neʔ 爾. The one I’ve presented here, attributing it to phonological reduction of the unstressed pronoun, is but one of several possibilities.

Postscript 2 of 3: Old Chinese pronunciations are reconstructed, not directly attested. The phonetic details of the reconstructed pronunciations vary depending on which scholar’s system one relies on.

For this thread, I’ve mostly referenced the “Minimal Old Chinese” reconstructions of Axel Schuessler, as given in his 2009 “Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese”. See p. 125, set 7-20.

For Middle Chinese and Old Mandarin, I’ve loosely followed Edwin Pulleyblank (see pp. 87-88 and 223-224 of his "Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation”).

Postscript 3 of 3: I can’t resist ending with one more question for us to ponder. There are Mandarin syllables pronounced ér (兒), ěr (爾/尔), and èr (二). But are there any pronounced in the first tone, ēr? If not, why not?

Maybe this can be a topic for a future thread.

/end (for reals this time)