Short thread with my thoughts on medieval Chinese tones
In any language that has lexically contrastive tones, if it has any kind of rising tone, it will also have a falling tone.
In any language that has lexically contrastive tones, if it has any kind of rising tone, it will also have a falling tone.
In both pitch-accent languages and full tonal languages, it’s possible for falling tones to exist without rising tones but there is AFAIK no tonal language (and only a handful of pitch-accent languages) that has ever been discovered where a rising tone existed w/o a falling tone.
This makes me suspicious of the common reconstruction of "Middle Chinese" as having a level tone and two different rising tones (one low-to-mid and the other mid-to-high) per Mei Tsulin, or two levels (one mid and one high) and one rising (one mid-to-high) per Ed Pulleyblank.
It is why I insist on reconstructing the 去聲 as a falling tone of some kind, and also probably the lower register of the 上聲. At least for the data available from Chang'an this is what makes sense.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
