Literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters

Cantonese literary and colloquial readings have quite regular relationships. A character's meaning is often different depending on whether it is read with a colloquial or literary reading.

Initials

• colloquial 'heavy labial' (重脣, bilabial) initials /p/ and /pʰ/ correspond to literary 'light labial' (輕脣, labiodental) initial /f/ (the light labial series is thought to come from the heavy labial series in Middle Chinese; Hakka share this pair of col-lit difference, see below)
• colloquial /ŋ/ initial (疑母) correspond to literary /j/ initial (以母)

Rimes

• colloquial readings with [ɛː] nuclei correspond to literary [ɪ] and [iː] nuclei
• colloquial [aː] correspond to literary [ɐ]
• colloquial [ɐi] correspond to literary [i]
• colloquial [œː] correspond to literary [ɔː]; of course, not all colloquial readings with a certain nucleus correspond to literary readings with another nucleus

Tones

• some Middle Chinese 'full-muddy (i.e. voiced obstruent) rising-tone' (全濁上聲) words now have colloquial 'subclear' (次清, aspirated) initials along with preserved 'muddy rising' (濁上) tone called yang rising (陽上), while literary initials are 'full-clear' (全清, tenuis) and merge into 'muddy departing' (濁去) tone called yang departing (陽去), but if they now have fricative or approximant initials then they have no aspiration distinction. Most other varieties share this sound change process to varying degrees which is called '(full) muddy rising become departing' ((全)濁上變去).

Examples:

Hakka has instances of differing literary and colloquial readings.[9]

Examples:

Literary readings in Modern Standard Mandarin are usually native pronunciations more conservative than colloquial readings.[3] This is because they reflect readings from before Beijing was the capital,[5] e.g. from the Ming dynasty. Most instances where there are different literary and colloquial readings occur with characters that have entering tones. Among those are primarily literary readings that have not been adopted into the Beijing dialect before the Yuan dynasty.[5] Colloquial readings of other regions have also been adopted into the Beijing dialect, a major difference being that literary readings are usually adopted with the colloquial readings. Some of the differences between the national standards of Taiwanese Mandarin and mainland Chinese Pǔtōnghuà are due to the fact that Putonghua tends to adopt colloquial readings for a character[10] while Guoyu tends to adopt a literary reading.[11]

Examples of literary readings adopted into the Beijing dialect:

Chinese Wikisource has original text related to this article:

普通話異讀詞審音表

Examples of colloquial readings adopted into the Beijing dialect:

In Sichuanese, colloquial readings tend to resemble Ba-Shu Chinese (Middle Sichuanese) or Southern Proto-Mandarin in Ming dynasty, while literary readings tend to resemble modern standard Mandarin. For example, in the Yaoling dialect the colloquial reading of "物" (meaning "things") is [væʔ],[12] which is very similar to its pronunciation of Ba-Shu Chinese in the Song dynasty (960–1279).[13] Meanwhile, its literary reading, [voʔ], is relatively similar to the standard Mandarin pronunciation [u]. The table below shows some Chinese characters with both literary and colloquial readings in Sichuanese.[14]

In the northern Wu-speaking region, the main sources of literary readings are the Beijing and Nanjing dialects during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and Modern Standard Chinese.[15] In the southern Wu-speaking region, literary readings tend to be adopted from the Hangzhou dialect. Colloquial readings tend to reflect an older sound system.[16]

Not all Wu dialects behave the same way. Some have more instances of discrepancies between literary and colloquial readings than others. For example, the character 魏 had a [ŋ] initial in Middle Chinese, and in literary readings, there is a null initial. In colloquial readings it is pronounced /ŋuɛ/ in Songjiang.[17] About 100 years ago, it was pronounced /ŋuɛ/ in Suzhou[18] and Shanghai, and now it is /uɛ/.

Some pairs of literary and colloquial readings are interchangeable in all cases, such as in the words 吳淞 and 松江. Some must be read in one particular reading. For example, 人民 must be read using the literary reading, /zəɲmiɲ/, and 人命 must be read using the colloquial reading, /ɲiɲmiɲ/. Some differences in reading for the same characters have different meanings, such as 巴結, using the colloquial reading /pʊtɕɪʔ/ means "make great effort," and using the literary reading /pɑtɕɪʔ/ means "get a desired outcome." Some readings are almost never used, such as colloquial /ŋ̍/ for 吳 and literary /tɕiɑ̃/ for 江.

Examples:

Min languages, such as Taiwanese Hokkien, separate reading pronunciations (讀音) from spoken pronunciations (語音) and explications (解說). Hokkien dictionaries in Taiwan often differentiate between such character readings with prefixes for literary readings and colloquial readings (文 and 白, respectively).

The following examples in Pe̍h-oē-jī show differences in character readings in Taiwanese Hokkien:[19][20]

In addition, some characters have multiple and unrelated pronunciations, adapted to represent Hokkien words. For example, the Hokkien word bah ("meat") is often written with the character 肉, which has etymologically unrelated colloquial and literary readings (he̍k and jio̍k, respectively).[21][22]

For more explanation, see Literary and colloquial readings in Hokkien.

In the Fuzhou dialect of Min Dong, literary readings are mainly used in formal phrases and words derived from the written language, while the colloquial ones are used in more colloquial phrases. Phonologically, a large range of phonemes can differ between the character's two readings: in tone, final, initial, or any and all of these features.

The following table uses Foochow Romanized as well as IPA for some of the major differences in readings.

The following are examples of variations between literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters in Gan Chinese.