Eastern Han Chinese

The rhyming practice of Han poets has been studied since the Qing period as an intermediate stage between the Shijing of the Western Zhou period and Tang poetry. The definitive reference was compiled by Luo Changpei and Zhou Zumo in 1958.[lower-alpha 1] This monumental work identifies the rhyme classes of the period, but leaves the phonetic value of each class open.[1]

In the Eastern Han period, Confucian scholars were bitterly divided between different versions of the classics: the officially recognized New Texts, and the Old Texts, recently found versions written in a pre-Qin script. To support their challenge to the orthodox position on the classics, Old Text scholars produced many philological studies. Many of these works contain remarks of various types on the pronunciation of various words.[2] The sources with the most glosses are the Shiming, a dictionary of classical terms, Xu Shen's Shuowen Jiezi, a study of the history and structure of Chinese characters, and Zheng Xuan's commentaries on various classics.[3]

Buddhism also expanded greatly in China during the Eastern Han period. Buddhist missionaries, beginning with An Shigao in AD 148, began translating Buddhist texts into Chinese.[4][5] These translations include transcriptions in Chinese characters of Sanskrit and Prakrit names and terms, which were first systematically mined for evidence of the evolution of Chinese phonology by Edwin Pulleyblank.[6]

The Shiming glosses were collected and studied by Nicholas Bodman.[7] Weldon South Coblin collected all the remaining glosses and transcriptions, and used them in an attempt to reconstruct an intermediate stage between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese, both represented by the reconstructions of Li Fang-Kuei.[8] Axel Schuessler included reconstructed pronunciations (under the name Later Han Chinese) in his dictionary of Old Chinese.[9][10]

The customary writing style of the period was strongly modelled on the classics, and thus provides only occasional glimpses of contemporary grammar.[11] However, some works, while generally following the conventional archaizing style, contain passages in a more colloquial style thought to reflect contemporary speech, at least in part. Many such examples are found in translated Buddhist literature, particularly direct speech.[12][13] Similarly, Zhao Qi's commentary on Mencius includes paraphrases of the classic written for the benefit of novice students, and therefore in a more contemporary style.[14] Similar passages are also found in the commentaries of Wang Yi, Zheng Xuan and Gao You.[15]

Major Han-period dialect groups inferred from the Fangyan

Several texts contain evidence of dialectal variation in the Eastern Han period. The Fangyan, from the start of the period, discusses variations in regional vocabulary. By analysing the text, Paul Serruys identified six dialect areas: a central area centred on the Central Plain east of Hangu Pass, surrounded by northern, eastern, southern and western areas, and a southeastern area to the south and east of the lower Yangtze.[16][17][18] Distinct rhyme systems of the Han period poets identified by Luo and Zhou broadly correspond to these dialect areas.[19]

The most influential dialect was the Qin–Jin dialect, from the western group, reflecting the ascendency of the state of Qin. Second was the Chu dialect, from the southern group, which spread both to the south and to the east. These two dialects were also the principal sources of the Han standard language. The central dialects of the area of former states of Lu, Song and Wei were the most conservative. The dialects of the eastern area, which had been more recently and slowly Sinified, include some non-Chinese vocabulary.[20]

The Eastern Han glosses come from 11 sites, all to the north of the Huai River.[21] They often show marked phonological differences. Many of them exhibit mergers that are not found in the 7th-century Qieyun or in many modern varieties. The exception is the Buddhist transcriptions, suggesting that the later varieties descend from Han-period varieties spoken in the region of Luoyang (in the western part of the central dialect area).[22]

The southeastern dialects are not reflected in Eastern Han texts. They were known as Wu (吳) or Jiangdong (江東) dialects in the Western Jin period, when the writer Guo Pu described them as quite distinct from other varieties.[23][24] Jerry Norman called these Han-era southeastern dialects Old Southern Chinese, and suggested that they were the source of common features found in the oldest layers of modern Yue, Hakka and Min varieties.[25]

Eastern Han Chinese syllables consisted of an initial consonant, optional medial glides, a vowel and an optional coda.

In comparison with Warring States texts, colloquial Eastern Han texts display a massive increase in compound content words in clearly distinguished word classes.[61][62] They also make much less use of function words in favour of periphrasis.[61][63]

The monosyllabic words of the classical period were largely replaced by disyllabic compounds with clearly defined syntactic roles:[64]

• verbs, such as bēi'āi 悲哀 'mourn', huānxǐ 歡喜 'rejoice', shūhǎo 姝好 'be beautiful' and fādòng 發動 'activate';
• nouns, such as shězhái 舍宅 'house', zhīshì 知識 'acquaintance', chùsuǒ 處所 'place', xíngtǐ 形體 'body' and rénmín 人民 'people';
• adverbs, such as dōulú 都盧 'all', shēnzì 身自 'personally', 'together' and ěrnǎi 爾乃 'then'.

The widespread use of measure words between numerals or demonstratives and nouns, a characteristic of the modern language, began in the Han period and became more extensive in the following Northern and Southern dynasties period.[65]

Old Chinese had a range of personal pronouns, including case distinctions. In the Eastern Han, these were reduced to first person wǒ 我 and second person rǔ 汝.[66][67] Similarly, the demonstratives were almost exclusively reduced to shì 是 'this', ěr 爾 'such' and bǐ 彼 'that'.[68] Both kinds of pronouns were often used with plural suffixes -děng 等, -bèi 輩 and -cáo 曹.[66] Most of the interrogatives of Old Chinese were replaced with periphrastic forms.[69]

The demonstrative shì 是 also came to be used as a copular verb in sentences of the form A 是 B (as in modern Chinese), replacing the typical classical pattern A B 也 (yě).[70][71][72] Unlike any other verb, shì 是 was not negated with bù 不 – the negative copula fēi 非 was retained from the classical language.[73]

In classical texts, the particle qǐ 豈 marked a rhetorical question, for which a negative answer was expected, but in the Eastern Han it was a general question marker.[63][74] At the same time, a new question marker níng 寧 appeared.[63][75]