zev handel Profile picture
24 Mar, 14 tweets, 5 min read
I’ve worked up a minute-long video recitation of a brief passage from the 3rd-century BCE Shāng Jūn Shū 商君書 (Book of Lord Shang) to try to give a feel for what the language might have sounded like around the time these words were first written. 1/

For the content, I chose the first few sentences from Chapter 2, Kěn Lìng 墾令 (Order to Cultivate Waste Lands), in response to this video and request from @stateswarring . For Old Chinese, I used Axel Schuessler (2009). 2/



I often recommend Schuessler’s “Minimal Old Chinese” reconstruction system to students of ancient China who aren’t specialists in historical phonology. It’s based on the framework of William Baxter’s influential 1992 Old Chinese, but strives to be less speculative. 3/
Here’s info on Schuessler’s book: /4

uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/minimal-…
It has a few advantages for the non-specialist. The notation has only a few unfamiliar phonetic symbols, so is largely accessible and pronounceable. Schuessler’s book is comprehensive and easy to use (it has a pinyin index and the content is an expansion of Karlgren’s GSR). 5/
It’s also probably more accurate than Baxter for the late Old Chinese period (Warring States and early Han), because many of the “etymological” reconstructions of Baxter 1992 and Baxter & Sagart 2014 are more likely to reflect word features present 500 to 1,000 years earlier. 6/
That said, all Old Chinese reconstructions are highly speculative. While some aspects of reconstructed pronunciations are rock-solid (like the *-s ending that later became Middle Chinese departing tone and modern Mandarin fourth tone), others are controversial or uncertain. 7/
And we don’t know enough to make fine-grained distinctions for different periods and regional dialects. So don’t let anyone convince you that this is what it *actually* sounded like. We just hope it’s a not-totally-off-base approximation! 8/
If you’re interested in a brief, general overview of how Old Chinese reconstructions are achieved, I’ve got a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics on the topic, and it’s free to read on the web: 9/

oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/o…
For a more comprehensive and detailed read, Baxter 1992 has very good, clearly written explanations of methodology and sources. It's also free from DeGruyter: 10/

degruyter.com/document/doi/1…
And @JPRidgway has pointed out that @MarcMiyake has a good overview of Chinese reconstruction in his book on Old Japanese: 11/

It would be an interesting exercise to extend this reading across a longer passage. It would also be interesting to do the reading in a few different Old Chinese reconstruction systems to illustrate their similarities and differences. Maybe something for the future! 12/
Feel free to share the link to the YouTube that's in the Tweet at the start of this thread. 13/end
Addendum: Here's a version without any background music.

YouTube link:

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More from @ZevHandel

25 Mar
I can't resist having references to "Out here in the fields" and "Teenage wasteland", but at your request I've made a second version with no distractions:

And yes, it's very strange that Sinologists don't read reconstructions aloud, especially when it comes to medieval poetry. Sound is an integral part of poetry; you'd think scholars of poetics would be falling all over themselves to recite the sounds of the poems as written.
Can you imagine scholars of Old English literature thinking about, talking about, or analyzing Beowulf without reciting it aloud in the original?

Yet that practice is the norm for dealing with ancient Chinese poetry. I've never understood it. Perhaps it's a failure of my field
Read 4 tweets
19 Mar
Let’s talk about radicals in Chinese characters, like 虫 in 蚊, and why they don’t work the way that you think they work.

This discussion will take us outside of China and into parts of the historical “sinographosphere”: 🇰🇷🇰🇵🇯🇵, and especially 🇻🇳.

🧵
We'll start with a little quiz. Here are five characters. Which one doesn’t fit the category that the others are in?

a 𠃣
b 𠀧
c 𡈺
d 𠳒
e 夠

Before you answer, let me warn you that it’s a trick question.
You said (e) 夠, didn’t you?

Even though I warned you it was a trick question?
Read 58 tweets
18 Mar
@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes Sure. Let's just suppose for the sake of argument that we have a core set of Sinitic languages descended from a common ancestor spoken in what is now northern China, under historical circumstances that can be reasonably approximated by the tree model of divergence.
@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes We can call that language Old Chinese and we'd like to reconstruct its vocabulary and phonology. We have two windows into that language's vocabulary and pronunciation. One is primarily text-based or, if you will, philological.

The other is cognate vocabulary in modern lgs.
@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes They aren't commensurate, for several reasons: (1) The textual record is incomplete, much is lost to us. So there might be words attested only in texts that haven't survived. (2) Because writing is employed only in certain socio-cultural contexts and is not a precise
Read 12 tweets
18 Mar
@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes They might claim they have but I wouldn’t characterize it that way. Both reconstructions are fundamentally based on projecting MC backwards into phonological categories induced from analysis of poetic rhyming and xiesheng series.
@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes B & S use Norman’s Proto-Min and extra-Sinitic borrowings as supplement to that method. Zhengzhang’s comparative supplements are highly unsystematic.
@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes Based only on a more or less strict application of the comparative method, I doubt you could reconstruct to earlier than Han. Much of the clustering and morphology they reconstruct is gone by then.
Read 4 tweets
17 Mar
@KIRINPUTRA @Tao_Collective @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes Thank you for taking the time to write this all out. I'll keep my responses brief.

1) I don't disagree with anything substantive you have said here.
@KIRINPUTRA @Tao_Collective @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes 2) I think your view of the field is somewhat outdated. It is not nearly as rigid as you describe. There are many young scholars, often native speakers, doing top-notch work describing the lexicon, morphology, and syntax of Chinese language varieties.
@KIRINPUTRA @Tao_Collective @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes They are not wedded to the old methods and they bring valuable perspectives, including knowledge of language use in socio-cultural context. This is not to say there isn't still an old guard, just that there are generational shifts happening.
Read 9 tweets

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