Eastern Han Chinese


Eastern Han Chinese or Later Han Chinese is the stage of the Chinese language revealed by poetry and glosses from the Eastern Han period.
It is considered an intermediate stage between Old Chinese and the Middle Chinese of the 7th-century Qieyun dictionary.

Dialects

Several texts contain evidence of dialectal variation in the Eastern Han period.
The Fangyan, from the start of the period, discusses variations in regional vocabulary.
By analysing the text, Paul Serruys identified six dialect areas: a central area centred on the Central Plain east of Hangu Pass, surrounded by northern, eastern, southern and western areas, and a southeastern area to the south and east of the lower Yangtze.
Distinct rhyme systems of the Han period poets identified by Luo and Zhou broadly correspond to these dialect areas.
The most influential dialect was the Qin–Jin dialect, from the western group, reflecting the ascendency of the state of Qin.
Second was the Chu dialect, from the southern group, which spread both to the south and to the east.
These two dialects were also the principal sources of the Han standard language.
The central dialects of the area of former states of Lu, Song and Wei were the most conservative.
The dialects of the eastern area, which had been more recently and slowly Sinified, include some non-Chinese vocabulary.
Eastern Han texts contain little information on the southeastern dialects.
They were known as Wu or Jiangdong dialects in the Western Jin period, when the writer Guo Pu described them as quite distinct from other varieties.
Jerry Norman called these Han-era southeastern dialects Old Southern Chinese, and suggested that they were the source of common features found in the oldest layers of modern Yue, Hakka and Min varieties.
The Eastern Han glosses come from 11 sites in the remaining areas.
They often show marked phonological differences.
Many of them exhibit mergers that are not found in the 7th-century Qieyun or in many modern varieties.
The exception is the Buddhist transcriptions, suggesting that the later varieties descend from Han-period varieties spoken in the region of Luoyang.

Phonology

The consonant clusters postulated for Old Chinese had generally disappeared by the Eastern Han period.
One of the major changes between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese was palatalization of initial dental stops and velar stops, merging to form a new series of palatal initials.
Several Eastern Han varieties show either or both of these palatalizations.
However, Proto-Min, which branched off during the Han period, has palatalized velars but not dentals.
The retroflex stops and sibilants of Middle Chinese are not distinguished from plain stops and sibilants in the Eastern Han data.
Some Eastern Han dialects show evidence of the voiceless sonorant initials postulated for Old Chinese, but they had disappeared by the Eastern Han period in most areas.
The Old Chinese voiceless lateral and nasal initials yielded a initial in eastern dialects and in western ones.
Most modern reconstructions of Old Chinese distinguish labiovelar and labiolaryngeal initials from the velar and laryngeal series.
However, the two series are not separated in Eastern Han glosses, suggesting that Eastern Han Chinese had a medial like Middle Chinese.
Moreover, this medial also occurs after other initials.
Most OC reconstructions include a medial to account for Middle Chinese retroflex initials, division-II finals and some chongniu finals, and this seems to have still been a distinct phoneme in the Eastern Han period.
Since the pioneering work of Bernhard Karlgren, it has been common to project the palatal medial of Middle Chinese division-III syllables back to an Old Chinese medial, but this has been challenged by several authors, partly because Eastern Han Buddhist transcriptions use such syllables for foreign words lacking any palatal element.
However, Coblin points out that this practice continued into the Tang period, for which the presence a -j- medial is generally accepted.
Scholars agree that the difference reflects a real phonological distinction, but there have been a range of proposals for its realization in early periods.
In Eastern Han commentaries, syllables that gave rise to Middle Chinese -j- are described as 'outside' or 'fast breath', while others are said to be 'inside or 'slow breath.
In some Eastern Han varieties, words with the Middle Chinese coda -n appear to have vocalic codas.
Baxter and Sagart argue that these words had a coda in Old Chinese, which became in Shandong and adjacent areas, and elsewhere.
André-Georges Haudricourt suggested that the Middle Chinese departing tone derived from an Old Chinese final, later weakening to.
Several Buddhist transcriptions indicate that was still present in the Eastern Han period.

Grammar

In comparison with Warring States texts, colloquial Eastern Han texts display a massive increase in compound content words in clearly distinguished word classes.
They also make much less use of function words in favour of periphrasis.
The monsyllabic words of the classical period were largely replaced by disyllabic compounds with clearly defined syntactic roles:
Old Chinese had a range of personal pronouns, including case distinctions.
In the Eastern Han, these were reduced to first person wǒ 我 and second person rǔ 汝.
Similarly, the demonstratives were almost exclusively reduced to shì 是 'this', ěr 爾 'such' and bǐ 彼 'that'.
Both kinds of pronouns were often used with plural suffixes -děng 等, -bèi 輩 and cáo 曹.
Most of the interrogatives of Old Chinese were replaced with periphrastic forms.
The word shì 是 also came to be used as a copular verb in sentences of the form A 是 B, replacing the typical classical pattern A B 也.
The negative copula fēi 非 was retained from the classical language; unlike any other verb, shì 是 was not be negated with bù 不.
In classical texts, the particle qǐ 豈 marked a rhetorical question, for which a negative answer was expected, but in the Eastern Han it was a general question marker.
At the same time, a new question marker níng 寧 appeared.

Citations

Works cited