Qieyun and Yunjing: the essential foundation for Chinese historical linguistics.

• Author: Pulleyblank, Edwin G.

In a recent article (Norman and Coblin 1995) I am chastised as a "neo-Karlgrenian" whose "mechanistic statements of correspondences between alleged stages of Chinese as codified in traditional dictionaries and rime tables" are "too far removed from the real linguistic and philological data" and lead to "a great deal of the vast richness and complexity of Chinese linguistic history being ignored or swept under the carpet." It is claimed that this "trivialize[s]" Chinese dialect studies and leads to a lack of attention to such things as "the actual popular lexicon" and "grammatical structure" of dialects, impeding "a more serious consideration of philological sources, especially various kinds of transcriptional data."(1)

Though my two critics are regrettably non-specific in their overly rhetorical sallies, I take it that the complaint about the alleged "trivialization" of dialect studies comes mostly from Jerry Norman, who has specialized in gathering and analyzing data from the Min dialect area. This is valuable and important work and though I don't engage in anything of the kind myself, I don't believe there is anything in my published work that can be said to "trivialize" it. I remain doubtful, however, of the possibility of successfully reconstructing Chinese linguistic history strictly from the evidence of modern dialects by the traditional comparative method as applied to languages without a written tradition. A major difficulty is that the Stammbaum or branching-tree model that is implied by the traditional comparative method is totally unrealistic in the case of Chinese. Even in remote parts of the country dialects have never developed in isolation. They have been influenced not only by their immediate neighbors but even more importantly by provincial and national standards spreading from successive political centers. The educated elite who have governed the country as the imperial bureaucracy have been the prime source of this influence, but itinerant traders have no doubt also played a role at a lower social level. The result is that all dialects are more or less multilayered. This is obvious even in Mandarin, which has alternative pronunciations for many common words. It is even more so in areas like Min that have been relatively isolated and have preserved traces of very archaic features. In some cases literary or reading pronunciations that give evidence of earlier outside influence are clearly labeled as such but in other cases pronunciations that follow the same pattern have been thoroughly naturalized into the vernacular. Sorting this out at the strictly contemporary level is difficult or even impossible. The historical depth provided by philological evidence for national standards of pronunciation at various periods in the past is indispensable. It is not a question of one or the other. The more we know about modern vernaculars the better we shall be able to understand the historical evidence, and vice versa.

South Coblin, who is not a field linguist but a philologist, is the one who is complaining about the neglect of transcriptional data. I find this complaint particularly ironic as it applies to my own work, since, as Coblin must know very well, I was subjected to harsh words from Karlgren after my first venture into Chinese historical linguistics, precisely because I made use of Chinese transcriptions of foreign words to criticize and propose modifications to his Old Chinese reconstruction (Pulleyblank 1962, Karlgren 1963). The same criticism was echoed in more polite terms by Coblin's teacher, Li Fang-kuei, in 1971 (see, also, idem 1974-75). In spite of this criticism, I have continued to use transcriptional evidence along with any other evidence I can find as a way of testing hypotheses about the pronunciation of Chinese at different periods, always being aware of the problems involved in matching the phonological system of Chinese with that of the particular foreign language in question. My complaint against Coblin when he in turn took up the study of early Buddhist transcriptions (Coblin 1981, 1983) was that, instead of using these transcriptions as a source of new evidence with which to test his teacher's Old Chinese reconstruction, he insisted on taking Li's reconstruction as a basic datum through which to interpret the transcriptions and so distorted the evidence (Pulleyblank 1985). To add to the irony in the present context, in his Old Chinese reconstruction Li, who is spared the opprobrious label "Karlgrenian" by my two critics, adopted Karlgren's Middle Chinese reconstruction essentially unchanged, brushing aside without discussion criticisms and modifications that had been proposed not only by myself but by scholars such as Maspero, Arisaka, Lu Zhiwei, Nagel, and others.

More recently Coblin has taken a totally opposite tack. Having decided that traditional Chinese linguistic scholarship as represented by rhyme dictionaries and rhyme tables is worthless, he surmises that he can reconstruct the pronunciation of particular regional forms of the language directly from the limited corpora provided by the transcriptions of bodies of texts or even single texts at a given time and place (Coblin 1991, 1994). This, I will admit, is something I have never done and would never dare to do. Imagine trying to analyze the phonology of present-day Mandarin with no access to native speakers on the basis of Chinese transcriptions of English names or a random collection of Chinese words transcribed in the Wade-Giles romanization with only the English values of the letters to go on. If such had been my procedure, I would have fully deserved the censure of Karlgren and Li. It should be stressed that Coblin still finds it necessary to cite the categories of what he calls the "Qieyun System" (actually the she of the rhyme tables) and Li's version of Karlgren's "Ancient Chinese" "for reference," as he puts it, in order to provide some kind of basic framework - which would otherwise be totally lacking - onto which to attach his speculations. His phonetic interpretation of this framework is, however, based on his guesses as to how foreign sounds in languages as dead as Middle Chinese, even though written in alphabetic scripts, would have sounded to a Chinese ear, or vice versa, without any clearly articulated theory as to the internal organization of the Chinese phonological system at the relevant time and place. The vowel systems that he proposes, in particular, seem to have been pulled out of thin air and to have little plausibility as any form of Chinese, or any other natural language, for that matter.

While Norman has never declared such a firm commitment to Li's Old Chinese reconstruction as Coblin, in his admirable survey of the history of Chinese (1988) he cited it as the best available system. Moreover, he is more indebted to Karlgren than he will admit. His dependence on Karlgren's Qieyun reconstruction is obvious in his recent foray into Old Chinese reconstruction (1994), which starts with the premise that "palatalization," as marked by the palatal glide or yod that Karlgren (followed by Li) reconstructed as a medial in so-called "Division III" rhymes, was characteristic of more than half the syllables in the Qieyun - a typological anomaly that Norman seeks to explain as a reversal of an earlier state of affairs in which the remainder of the syllables were pharyngealized. How does Norman know that more than half the syllables in the Qieyun were palatalized? It can only be because Karlgren said so. There is nothing in the text of the Qieyun or any of the rhyme tables to this effect. The concept of a palatal glide as characteristic of rhymes placed wholly or partly in Grade III in the rhyme tables comes straight from Karlgren. Though it has been more or less universally accepted, it was a basic error that Karlgren inherited from his predecessors and perversely adhered to in spite of obvious counter-evidence that he refused to recognize (Pulleyblank 1995). More on this below.

One of the curious accusations made against Karlgren and his method by my critics is that he was only interested in phonological systems (their emphasis) in the abstract and not in "'languages' [their quotes] in the concrete sense of the word" including grammar and lexicon. Now, it is true that Karlgren's Ancient Chinese and Archaic Chinese are phonological reconstructions but to say that he was not also interested in grammar and lexicon is manifestly false, at least as far as Old Chinese was concerned, and to claim otherwise merely shows ignorance. His articles, "Le Proto-chinois, langue flexionelle" (1920) and "The Authenticity and Nature of the Tso-chuan" (1926), were pioneering attempts to investigate the morphology of particles and grammatical and lexical distinctions between dialects within Chinese classical literature, and later articles continued to show interest in these questions. Moreover, his great lexical works, Grammata Serica (1940) and its revision Grammata Serica Recensa (1957), though not dictionaries in the full sense, including actual text examples, are exemplary in citing textual sources for all the meanings listed. As for myself, as a so-called "neo-Karlgrenian," I think I can claim to have demonstrated considerable interest in Old Chinese grammar. One of my main motivations in taking up the problem of Old Chinese phonology was my conviction that Karlgren's system was inadequate to account for the morphology of grammatical particles in that language. Karlgren did not concern himself with the grammar or lexicon of vernacular texts of the Middle Chinese period, but I am not aware that either Coblin or Norman has done much if anything in that field either. Other scholars have specialized in the study of such vernacular texts and more work of this kind is certainly desirable, but it is hard to see why this should detract from the importance of studying the history of the sound system, which is...