Teochew literary reading (3) - Where do literary vs. vernacular readings come from?
Previously, we wrote about the difference between literary and vernacular pronunciations for the same character in Teochew and other Min languages. We noticed that literary pronunciations are often closer to Mandarin, and that these parallel pronunciations represent different historical layers in the language. How did this actually happen?
The region where Teochew is spoken today was originally inhabited by non-Chinese-speaking cultures. The Chinese language was brought down from the North by migration and settlement. This evolved into the first “layer” of these Southern dialects. Because the South was relatively isolated, their speech ended up becoming very different from other regions. Teochew belongs to the Min language family, which probably split off from the other Chinese languages around the time of the Han dynasty (beginning of 1st millennium CE).
However, the political and cultural center of the Chinese state remained in the North, so officials and elites also learned to speak the language of the capital. Although there was not a single “national language” like Putonghua (Mandarin) in today’s China, and education was primarily in the local langauges and dialects, the capital’s language still had prestige. Therefore Min Chinese languages also incorporated additional layers of borrowings from northern Chinese, which could have been brought by subsequent waves of migration from north to south, or from scholar-officials using the Northern pronunciation to recite written texts, which was then transmitted locally when this was taught in schools as the “literary pronunciation”.
How can we reconstruct when these different layers originated, especially since Chinese writing does not reflect pronunciation directly? One way that this can be done is by comparing the different pronunciations used for a given character today to rhyme-dictionaries compiled in different historical eras. These dictionaries recorded how characters should be pronounced by listing other characters with the same pronunciation, or with the same initial or final. If one character had the same pronunciation as another in one era, but no longer did so a few hundred years later, we can deduce that the pronunciation had changed during this time. Using painstaking methods like this, the literary pronunciation in Min languages is thought to have originated from around the time of the Tang dynasty.
Further information:
- 楊秀芳《閩南語文白系統的研究》. PhD thesis by Yang Hsiu-fang on the literary vs. colloquial pronunciation systems in Southern Min languages (includes a chapter on Teochew).
- Lecture series (in Mandarin) by Prof. Yang on Southern Min (Taiwanese); in Lecture 4 the phenomenon of literary vs. vernacular readings is explained very clearly.
- “A brief history of Chinese dialects” by Hillary Chappell (2001)
Posted on 2021-05-13 00:00:00 +0000