Francisco Varo and the sound system of early Qing Mandarin.

• Author: Coblin, W. South
• Position: Dominican friar who conducted research on Chinese historical phonology

1. INTRODUCTION

   The Arte de la Lengua Mandarina, by Francisco Varo (1627-87), a Spanish Dominican missionary, was completed in Fuzhou in 1682 and printed posthumously in Canton in 1703. It is probably the earliest published grammar of any form of Chinese. The language described in the text was known to the Chinese as Guanhua ["language of the officials"], of which the Spanish term la lengua mandarina is a direct translation. Varo makes clear that this "language of the officials," was a Nanking-based koine. It was therefore a Jiang-Huai-type dialect, rather than a northern one of the Pekingese variety. And in fact it was essentially the same standard form of Chinese used in late Ming times, when it was encountered and studied in various parts of China by Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and his confreres. Varo's Arte deals with the language as a whole. The present study is concerned with his treatment of the non-tonal phonetics of Guanhua. His discussion of tones, which is of great interest and importance, has been dealt with in a separate paper (Coblin 1996) and will be mentioned only briefly here (see section VI, below). The English versions of Varo's text used here are from a forthcoming translation (Coblin and Levi, in progress). References will be to the page numbers of the 1703 edition of the text.

   Varo's primary treatment of Guanhua phonology is found in the first and second chapters of his book. It is directed towards Spanish readers; and, as is typical for the period in which he was writing, it is in the main framed as an exposition of orthography rather than of phonetics as such. There seems to be a basic assumption that those letters in the romanization that could be pronounced essentially as in contemporary Spanish required little or no explanation. Discussion is therefore devoted to cases where the Spanish reader would not be able to produce Chinese sounds correctly on the basis of his native pronunciation of orthographic forms. In addition to this Spanish-oriented treatment of Guanhua sounds, there is in the prologue of the book a set of notes for French readers. Varo remarks that he did not know French himself but was helped in this section by another person who was "erudite" in that language. He does not state the nationality of this individual. In the present paper we shall draw primarily on the Spanish and secondarily on the French-oriented sections of Varo's text to elucidate the sound system of his variety of Guanhua.

   The romanization system used by Varo did not originate with him. Instead, it evolved over a period of several decades during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, primarily under the direction and influence of Matteo Ricci. It seems to have been mainly Portuguese-based, Portuguese being the lingua franca of the mission during that period. It became standard among seventeenth-century Catholic missionaries in China and was to a certain extent "codified" by Niklaas (Nicola, Nicolas) Trigault (1577-1628) in his famous syllabary, the Xiru ermuzi. It seems to have served its purpose fairly well for speakers of southern Romance languages, though not, as we have seen, for the French, who eventually established their own orthographic conventions for Chinese. Varo made several changes in the received system for the benefit of his Spanish-speaking readership.

2. INITIAL CONSONANTS

   1. Aspiration. Varo's Guanhua distinguished between aspirated and plain stops and affricates. Aspiration was marked by an apostrophe-like diacritic, which could be written at any point after the initial consonant of a syllable and was in fact quite often added in absolute final position. Varo seems to view it as a supra-segmental characteristic associated with tone rather than as a feature of the initial consonants as such. His name for it is "guttural," and he in effect sets up a series of "guttural tones," parallel to the "plain tones," to account for it. He goes to great lengths in describing the nature of aspiration and the way to produce it, presumably because Spanish readers would have found the phonemic distinction between aspirated and plain obstruents unfamiliar and difficult to master. In the present paper we shall, as a graphic convention, place the apostrophe directly after the initial consonant of the syllable in which it occurs in Varo's spelling forms.

   2. The Labial, Labiodental, and Dental Series. The following labials, labiodentals, and dentals occur in Varo's Guanhua:

      p [p] p[prime] [p'] m [m]

      f [f] v [v]

      t [t] t[prime] [t'] n [n] l [l]

      The first form in each pair above is Varo's orthographic rendering. The following, bracketed one is the presumed phonetic value. These consonants receive no special treatment in Varo's discussions, except for his remarks on aspiration. With the exception of this feature, they were presumably assumed to be easily mastered by Spanish or French speakers.

   3. The Gutturals. This series comprises the following consonants:

      k [kl k[prime] [k[prime]] g [n] h [x] (or [h] ?)

      Varo has no comment on the pronunciation of the initial letter g-. Contemporary and slightly earlier and later missionary romanizations of Guanhua usually write ng-instead of Varo's g-. Compare, for example, the following spellings for ai:

      Portuguese-Chinese Dictionary (ca. 1580) ngai

      Ricci-Ruggieri Dictionary (ca. 1580) ngai

      Ricci (ca. 1605) ngai

      Trigault (1623) gai

      Varo (1682) gai

      Premare (1730) ngai

      In his notes for French readers Varo usually retains his g- in these cases, but in one instance he switches to ng-, i.e., for his own go he writes ngos for the French. In any case, it seems probable that the underlying Chinese sound was a velar nasal.

      Regarding h- Varo says (p. 18), "The words that begin with h should be pronounced by striking with force the following vowel, in the manner of the Andalusians...."...