A Contribution to the History of the ch'ing yin [antikvár]

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE HISTORY OF THE m^ CH'ING YIN B. CSONGOR The complicated tangle of problems concerning the history of Chinese tones has still so far eluded solution. This holds true in first place of the individual tones of the various Chinese characters pronounced separately, hut considering the question of the alternation of tones due to stress in Chinese speech in whatever epoch, the problem becomes quite enormous. Leaving aside the fact that on the basis of old rhyme-dictionaries we are pretty well able to draw some formal conclusions concerning the development of old tone-classes from T'ang-time into their present state, the real nature of old Chinese tones remains still quite a mystery.^ This time I do not want to enter into a detailed discussion of this rather complicated subject. I propose only to give some hints about the sound-alternations caused by the unstressed position from a dialect of the late T'ang-time. This linguistic phenomenon is well-known to students of modern Chinese in present day Chinese speech. The technical term for it is IMW ch'ing yin.^ This term is strictly kept apart from the term ch'ing sheng which denotes the weakening of the tone itself. As the idea of stress in Chinese — at least as much as it can be ascertained from some modern dialects — is rather a complex one,® we adopt as a counterpart of ch'ing yin the term fi^ chung yin in the only sense that the words having it were not ch'ing yin. The appearance of ch'ing sheng under certain conditions has been observed in quite a lot of works dealing with a great variety of present day Chinese dialects. For my purpose here it would be unnecessary to enumerate them 1 It would be a very arduous task, if not impossible altogether, to translate into modern phonetic terms the definitions of tones tliat may be found here and there in old Chinese literature from Liu Ch'ao-time onwards. 2 I borrow this term from Hsii Shih-jung. Cf. his paper entitled -^jl (P'" ''""ff y" 2/'« ckiang, ch'ing chung yin): Wenzi gaige 1957, No 10, pp. 45—47. ® Cf. Hsii Shih-jung, op. cif., where four kinds of sound intensity are set up in current Pekinese.