Common Yue: A Comparative Study of Yue Dialect Historical Phonology

Abstract

Common Yue is a comparative study of the phonology of the Yuè dialects of Guǎngdōng and Guǎngxī. It draws upon the lexical studies and zìyīn 字音character reading data of 21 Yuè dialects as recorded in the fieldwork of Zhān, Cheung, et al. (1987a,b; 1994; 1998), Xiè (2007), and Lǐ (2014) and Xiǎn (2016). Common Yue differs from previous studies in that: 1) Labiodentals are separate from velar fricatives. Labiodentals were historically a secondary class of phonemes used to approximate northern koiné loans of late origin. 2) Sonorant initials occur in both the yīn 陰 and yáng 陽 registers of tone, as is common in Mín, Hakka, and Shē dialects. 3) Labiovelars are phonemic units rather than sequences of initial and medial segments. Remaining “medial”[i] is treated as a fused part of vocalic clusters rather than an independent segment due to its limited distribution, i.e. it only occurs before the phonetic segments [a] and [ɔ]. 4) The split of the historical yīnrù 陰入tone into high and low registers was conditioned by the feature [open] in vocalic nuclei. Vowel chain shifts obscure this original conditioning environment, but it is still partially observable in conservative dialects. 5) Common Yue has two reflexes of tone 4, tone 4a and tone 4b. Tone 4a is reconstructed where Sìyì dialects have tone 1 and other dialects have tone 4, while tone 4b is reconstructed where all dialects have tone 4. The latter tone correlates with koiné readings of sonorant onset words and seems to be at least partially secondary in origin like the labiodentals. These revisions allow for a more complete description of diachronic Yuè phonology and open the door to exploration of the genetic relationship of Yuè to the daughter dialects of Early Southern Highlands Chinese (Coblin, 2018) and other neighboring languages.