Consonant Endings of Míng Dynasty Mandarin as Reflected in the Chinese Transcriptions of Uyghur Vocabulary in Gāochāng guǎn zázì

Abstract

This thesis is intended to provide a better understanding of Míng 明 dynasty Mandarin (Guānhuà 官話) consonant endings as reflected in the Chinese transcriptions of Uyghur vocabulary in Gāochāng guǎn zázì 高昌館雜字, a Míng dynasty text of Chinese-Uyghur terms. By analyzing all 1040 terms collected from the five editions of Gāochāng guǎn zázì, we determine the values of the six Middle Chinese consonant endings in Míng dynasty Guānhuà and make some interesting observations about the Middle Chinese (MC) rù tone in particular. Our method of analyzing consists of two steps of isolating Uyghur syllables and Chinese transcriptional characters with particular characteristics. The first step is isolating Uyghur syllable final and word final consonant sounds (-m, -n, - ŋ, -p, -b, -t, -d, -k, -ɡ, -q and -ɣ) and finding their correspondences in the Chinese transcriptions. The second step is collecting a list of characters with Middle Chinese nasal and stop codas (-m, -n, - ŋ, -p, -t, and -k) that were used in the transcriptions of Gāochāng guǎn zázì and finding their sound correspondences in the Uyghur entries. Then we analyze the Uyghur and Chinese data to discover correspondence patterns and use them to draw conclusions about the pronunciation of the Chinese transcriptional characters. Based on the data analysis, we have sufficient evidence to indicate that when the earliest editions of Gāochāng guǎn zázì were compiled in the early fifteenth century, Middle Chinese -m had already merged with -n. Furthermore, analysis of the transcriptional values of MC rù tone characters reveals that the stop endings of the rù tone had completely disappeared. Despite the fact that they had become open syllables (lacking even a glottal stop coda), they were still a separate tone category with shorter duration. This conclusion advances or revises the conclusions of other scholars who have looked at this material, sometimes in a less comprehensive way.