{"id":466,"date":"2010-04-30T10:00:43","date_gmt":"2010-04-30T08:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=466"},"modified":"2010-03-04T12:11:13","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T10:11:13","slug":"the-chinese-rime-tables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=466","title":{"rendered":"The Chinese rime tables"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Chinese rime tables:<\/strong> Linguistic philosophy and historical-comparative phonology. Ed. by David Prager Branner<\/strong>. (Current issues in linguistic theory 271.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006. Pp. viii, 358. ISBN 9789027247858<\/a>. $180 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Jakob Dempsey<\/strong><\/a>, Yuan-ze University, Taiwan<\/em><\/p>\n

This volume combines three main themes: (i) a review of modern scholarly activity related to the medieval rime-tables; (ii) papers discussing early Chinese phonology with reference to rime-table categories; and (iii) papers and appendices focusing on transcription-related issues, including a lengthy treatment of diasystemic transcription systems for Chinese (i.e. systems used to represent more than one dialect or language).<\/p>\n

David Branner\u2019s introduction includes instructions on how to use the tables to spell out contemporary (i.e. literary) pronunciations in a given dialect, along with background on the Indian, especially Buddhist, origins of such tabular phonology. The introduction focuses on \u2018the contested place in the modern<\/em> study of Chinese historical phonology\u2019 (12) accorded to the rime-tables. The intentions of the original writers are a central issue: What language were the original rime-table creators trying to represent? How was this methodology used to describe later forms of Chinese? In East Asia, many scholars regard the rime-tables as a guide to the language of the Qie\u0300 yu\u0300n, but Branner is rightly suspicious (e.g. how would the tables\u2019 creators know the pronunciation of a language spoken several hundred years before their time?) and focuses more on Edwin Pulleyblank\u2019s influential analysis and its problems. The introduction also discusses the word \u7b49<\/span> <\/span>de\u030cng<\/em>, often transcribed as \u2018division\u2019, a concept central to the rime-tables. How to phonologically interpret the apparent contrasts among the various divisions has been a matter of dispute for over a century; papers by Abraham Chan<\/strong>, Axel Schuessler<\/strong>, Wen-chao Li<\/strong>, and An-king Lim<\/strong> offer new interpretations, with the latter two invoking influence from Altaic speakers. Two papers by W. South Coblin<\/strong> and one by Branner deal with the medieval and early modern history of rime-table scholarship. Papers by Richard Vanness Simmons<\/strong> and Jerry Norman<\/strong> speak against the common tendency to force modern dialectology into the Procrustean bed of rime-table categories.<\/p>\n

The last third of this book demonstrates ways to transcribe and represent the phonological categories of the rime-tables to serve a utilitarian purpose such as a comparison of modern dialects (in another paper by Richard Vanness Simmons), or depicting a phonological system that (according to the paper by Jerry Norman) underlies a majority of modern Chinese dialects. Branner\u2019s paper \u2018Some composite phonological systems in Chinese\u2019 covers these issues, and he further offers a large appendix with ten transcription systems for medieval Chinese, including his own neutral transcription system. However, the systems used by Norman and Branner limit themselves to the basic twenty-six letters; years ago this was a practical if not ideal procedure, but now it leads to misleading representations and overly complex formulations that could easily be avoided. What Norman transcribes as *iang<\/em> may well have been *e\u014b<\/em>; however, the character e <\/em>is already being used for <\/em>\/\u0259\/. He transcribes \u842c <\/span><\/span>as mvan<\/em>, which resembles no historical development known to this reviewer. A more practical way to merely representing the rime-books\u2019 categories might resemble this reviewer\u2019s long-standing \u5386\u4ee3\u62fc\u97f3 <\/span><\/span>(lidaipinyin) system, a historical spelling (cf. right-rite-write-wright<\/em>), which is simply pronounced as modern Standard Chinese.<\/p>\n

This book is recommended for its innovative treatment of a topic rarely covered in books outside of China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chinese rime tables: Linguistic philosophy and historical-comparative phonology. Ed. by David Prager Branner. (Current issues in linguistic theory 271.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006. Pp. viii, 358. ISBN 9789027247858. $180 (Hb). Reviewed by Jakob Dempsey, Yuan-ze University, Taiwan This volume combines three main themes: (i) a review of modern scholarly activity related to the medieval […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":467,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions\/467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}