Middle Chinese finals


In Middle Chinese, the phonological system of medieval rime dictionaries and rime tables, the final is the rest of the syllable after the initial consonant.
This analysis is derived from the traditional Chinese fanqie system of indicating pronunciation with a pair of characters indicating the sounds of the initial and final parts of the syllable respectively, though in both cases several characters were used for each sound.
Reconstruction of the pronunciation of finals is much more difficult than for initials due to the combination of multiple phonemes into a single class, and there is no agreement as to their values.
Because of this lack of consensus, understanding of the reconstruction of finals requires delving into the details of rime tables and rime dictionaries.

Finals and rhyme classes

Each final is contained within a single rhyme class, but a rhyme class may contain more than one final:
Karlgren noticed that classes of finals from the rime dictionaries were placed in different rows of the rime tables.
As three classes of final were confined to the first, second and fourth rows respectively, he named them finals of divisions I, II and IV.
The remaining finals he called "division-III finals" because they occurred in the third row of the tables.
Some of these occurred only in that row, while others could also occur in the second or fourth rows with some initials.
Karlgren disregarded the chongniu distinction, but later workers have emphasized its importance.
Li Rong, in a systematic comparison of the rhyme tables with a recently discovered early edition of the Qieyun, identified seven classes of finals.
The table below lists the combinations of initial and final classes that occur in the Qieyun, with the row of the rime tables in which each combination was placed:
The mixed and chongniu finals, though designated as division-III finals, are spread across rows 2 and 4 as well as row 3 of the tables.
To handle these cases, a distinction is made between the row that the homophone class is placed in and the "division" of its final. This article distinguishes rows by Arabic numerals 1 2 3 4 and divisions by Roman numerals I II III IV. In addition, chóngniǔ finals in division III are notated in the table of final outcomes below as III/3 or III/4, depending on the row in which they occur.

Significance of the division

There are correspondences between certain divisions and the presence or absence of medial glides in later dialects, in ways that differ depending on the class of the initial. There are also clear co-occurrence restrictions between initials and divisions, in that initials from certain of these same classes can occur with finals only from certain divisions. The LMC authors of this system appear to have been aware of these classes of initials, and seem to have determined the separation into divisions partly on the basis of the co-occurrence relationships and partly on the medial glides, although it is debated how the exact classification was made. It is important to remember that the authors of this system were attempting to use LMC phonology to reconstruct EMC phonology.
The clearest difference is between division III and other divisions, with division III generally corresponding to palatal initials and/or finals with palatal vowels or glides. In addition, divisions I and IV allow exactly the same set of initials in EMC, suggesting that the distinction between the two postdates the EMC period. Division-IV syllables are commonly thought to reflect a diphthong containing a vocalic glide /i/ in LMC, corresponding to an EMC mid-front monophthong, variously reconstructed as or. Beyond this, there is no consensus.
Karlgren, and many authors following him, suggest that neither divisions I nor II had any medial other than /w/ or /u/, with division I corresponding to back vowels and division II to front vowels. Some authors have suggested that division II corresponded not so much to front vowels as to centralized vowels. Many authors have recently suggested that division-II syllables consistently had a medial /r/ in Old Chinese, although this appeared to have already disappeared by EMC, so it's unclear exactly how this would have been carried forward into LMC.

Table of Early Middle Chinese finals

The following table lists Early Middle Chinese reconstructed "finals", according to different authors. It also lists the corresponding Late Middle Chinese outcomes according to Pulleyblank, and the Standard Mandarin outcomes using Pinyin spelling. The table does not explicitly list finals ending in /p/, /t/ or /k/, but these can easily be derived by substituting for, for, and for. Some columns are not strictly in IPA.
;Late Middle Chinese outcomes
Codes for initial classes:
;Standard Mandarin outcomes
The modern outcomes are listed using the following codes:
The outcomes are written either as individual outcomes in Pinyin, or combined outcomes in "pseudo-Pinyin". "Pseudo-Pinyin" uses Pinyin conventions but without any of the abbreviations normally in use in Pinyin. Examples:
When not indicated, the choice of whether a velar or palatal occurs is determined by the following vowel: palatals before -i or -ü, velars elsewhere.
Example: A listed outcome like -uo, Ge, PMo; also Ta, occ. wo means that the outcome is -e for a guttural ; -o for a labial ; -uo elsewhere; but for alveolar stops, -a also appears, and wo occasionally appears instead of e as the outcome of MC ʔ- or ŋ-.
These outcomes assume the normal correspondences between EMC initials and Standard Mandarin initials:
In a couple of situations where two different EMC initials have merged, the modern outcome is nonetheless different depending on the EMC initial:

Palatal glide coda

Labial-velar glide coda

Labial codas

Dental codas

Velar codas