Networks of pronunciation glosses in Traditional Chinese phonology

Every person who has learned how to read in any language will at some point have to deal with the question of how to pronounce words with unusual spellings. The English writing system offers an abundance of examples; and in my own pronunciation practice of English, I am still frequently corrected by native speakers when mispronouncing words that I know only from books.

For example, what constitutes a big problem for me is the stress on words of Latin origin, which have different stress patterns in German, my native tongue. While we speak of a Theo·rem in German, stressing the final syllable, English pronounces the word as the·orem, stressing the first. But my problems with the English writing system (and probably the problems of many other non-native and native speakers as well) do not usually end with the placement of stress, but may often go much deeper.

Pronunciation

Determining how an unknown word is pronounced in English is very easy nowadays. One can just use one of the numerous online dictionaries, where pronunciations are given in form of sound files. Another, more old-fashioned, alternative is to consult a classical dictionary that illustrate pronunciation with help of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA 1999). As linguists, we use it on a regular basis in order to compare pronunciations of words across different languages and language families. The original purpose of the IPA, however, was essentially the correct pronunciation for first and second language acquisition; and many teachers were involved in its creation in the late 19th century (compare Kalusky 2017).

Even earlier than the standardization efforts by the International Phonetic Association are ad hoc practices of glossing the pronunciation of difficult words, by comparing them with the pronunciation of more common words in the same language. In order to explain the pronunciation of the English word digest, for example, we could say that word is pronounced as die in dead and as gest in adventure. In the English context, it seems furthermore to be common to make use of some very basic syllables that most people will read and pronounce unambiguously, like ah for the a we find in abacus as opposed the the a we find in and, or toe for the "normal" o-sound we find in no as opposed to the sound of the o in words like to.

That these ad hoc systems, which humans use to gloss pronunciations in writing, are not very reliable can be easily understood when recalling that writing systems have often grown over centuries, reflecting different layers of pronunciation practices applied to words that were imported into the languages at different stages in history. English is, of course, an extremely messy case, but even writing systems like German or Russian, of which speakers would say that the pronunciation is close to the spelling, are far from reaching the explicitness of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Chinese pronunciation

A particularly interesting case concerns historical glossing practices in the history of Chinese. As I mentioned in an earlier blogpost on networks in Chinese poetry, the Chinese writing system gives only minimal hints regarding the pronunciation of its characters. A character like 手 "hand", which is pronounced as shǒu (or [ʂɔu²¹⁴] in the IPA), does not tell us anything about its pronunciation; and even its meaning is difficult to derive from its modern written form.

Chinese scholars became aware of the problem rather early, around the 1st century AD when they tried to read the ancient texts produced by their intellectual and poetic masters some 500 years before. In order to make sure that the pronunciation of infrequent characters would not be forgotten over time, they developed different ways to gloss character pronunciations in a more or less systematic manner.

The ancient Chinese scholars didn't have an alphabet to simply transcribe their sounds — intensive contact with Indian phoneticians started much later. So, they started from simple equations, according to which one character was pronounced similarly to another character.

For example, the Shuōwén Jiězì (Explaining Simple and Complex Characters) is an early Chinese character dictionary by the famous scholar Xǔ Shèn (58-148 AD), which was published in 121 AD. In it, the author occasionally uses the formula "read [this character] as X" (in Chinese 读若 dúruò X), in addition to his explanations of the meanings and the structure of the characters. The disadvantage of this duruo method, as linguists often call it (Coblin 1983), is that it only allows glossing of characters for which a simple character with an identical pronunciation exists. It is also not clear whether the formula consistently points to strictly identical pronunciations or whether certain deviations are allowed.

In order to overcome these problems, much more precise ways of glossing character pronunciations were developed from about the 2nd century AD. One of the most interesting glossing systems in this context is the so-called fǎnqiè spellings (Coblin 1983, Branner 2000). This spelling method, which seems to go back to at least the third century, is based on breaking the character pronunciation into two parts, the initial and the final, and selecting one character for glossing each of the two parts — one with an identical initial sound and one with the identical final. If we applied this method to English, we could think of explaining the pronunciation of rice as rye-nice, with rye pointing to the initial sound r and nice pointing to the final of the word.

In the following figure, I have tried to illustrate how both methods (the dúruò and the fǎnqiè method) are applied in concrete examples of text.

Given their straightforwardness and simplicity, fǎnqiè pronunciation glosses became quite popular among Chinese scholars. Even today, people may occasionally use them in order to explain pronunciations without having to rely on foreign writing systems, like the Latin alphabet. As a result, there is an abundance of sources that use this pronunciation device throughout the history of the Chinese language. Although the pronunciation is only given indirectly, with respect to the pronunciation traditions that were active during a given epoch, the fǎnqiè spellings offer great help to explore how the pronunciation of the Chinese language changed over time.

Pronunciation networks

Most of this research on the usage of fǎnqiè spellings has been carried out manually. The first work on fǎnqiè spelling goes back to the early 19th century, when scholars like Chén Lǐ (1818-1882) began to investigate systematically which characters were used to denote certain initial sounds (in Chinese, these are called the upper fǎnqiè characters, fǎnqiè shàngzì 反切上字), and which characters were used to denote the finals (called the lower fǎnqiè characters, fǎnqiè xiàzì 反切下字).

As we might expect, instead of using the same character for the pronunciation of the initial sound all the time, scholars would often alternate the characters, but the alternations were more or less consistent, with some characters being used more frequently and some characters being used less frequently. Scholars like Chén Lǐ figured out that the characters could be classified in a rather rigorous manner which would allow us to reconstruct direct pronunciations of the fǎnqiè spellings.

For example, based on the spellings reported in the Qièyùn, an early rhyme book published in 601 AD, we can say that the characters gōng 公, gǔ 古, gàn 干, etc. were regularly used to indicate initials that would be spelled as [k] in the International Phonetic Alphabet, while kǒu 口, kě 可, and kǔ 苦 were used to pronounce [kʰ] (a k with strong aspiration).

What I find even more interesting and important than these concrete findings, is that Chinese scholars inherently employed rudimentary network thinking to arrive at their clusters (Gēng 2004). The system of glossed character and glossing character can be easily translated into a system of directed networks, in which we draw a link from the glossing character to the glossed character.

For a talk held earlier during the last year (List 2017), I constructed such a network from the Guǎngyùn (ca. 1000 AD), a later edition of the aforementioned rhymebook Qièyùn, which gives fǎnqiè spellings for more than 20,000 characters. In this network, I concentrated only on the initials, that is, the initial consonants of the language encoded in the source, and constructed a network of all internal relations among the glossing characters. The full network is shown in the following figure.

Eyeballing the network, we can see that the system does look rather systematic. The network is not connected and, apart from a few large connected components, we find a lot of discrete groups that seem to reflect individual initial sounds that were clearly distinguished from other sounds in the fǎnqiè spellings.

The following figure shows a part of the network, namely the second cluster in the big network (above) when going from left to right and staying at the top. In this figure, we can see that the network has two highly connected source characters linking to almost all of the other characters.

I have to admit that I am still having trouble interpreting the network satisfactorily, let alone designing more complex methods to analyse it. Nevertheless, I have the hope that the network analysis of Chinese pronunciation glosses can give us new insights into the phonetic history of Chinese. Importantly, the structures reflected by the network are true pronunciation differences, and that we can indeed find concrete sounds in the indirect fǎnqiè spelling system, becomes specifically clear when comparing the reconstructed pronunciations of the characters in the sample with each other.

For example, when you look at the figure below, you can see that our connected component represents two different clusters of initials, namely a simple k and an aspirated kʰ. The node that links the two groups is given the pronunciation kʰ in our example, but its original reading is ambiguous. The character has two readings and two meanings reflecting both ancient k and ancient kʰ (today pronounced as jiē «Chinese pistachio tree» and kǎi «template», respectively).

Networks of pronunciation glosses in Chinese Traditional Phonology are still under-explored, both with respect to traditional scholarship and with respect to the way they are best handled and analyzed in modern network approaches. If we could develop an approach that would infer the clusters of glosses that point consistently to the same sound, they could give us fascinating insights, not only into the phonological system of Chinese varieties spoken during a given time period, but perhaps also into the dynamics underlying pronunciation changes, when comparing different networks across different times and places.

References

• Branner, D. (2000) The rime-table system of formal Chinese phonology. In: Auroux, S., E. Koerner, H.-J. Niederehe, and K. Versteegh (eds.): History of the language sciences.1.18. de Gruyter: Berlin and New York. 46-55.
• Coblin, W. (1983) A Handbook of Eastern Han Sound Glosses. The Chinese University Press: Chicago.
• Gēng Zhènshēng 耿振生 (2004) 20 shìjì Hànyǔ yǔyīnxué fāngfǎ lùn 20世纪汉语音韵学方法论 [20th century’s methods in traditional Chinese phonology]. Běijīng Dàxué 北京大學: Běijīng 北京.
• International Phonetic Association (1999): IPA Handbook. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
• Kalusky, W. (2017) Die Transkription der Sprachlaute des Internationalen Phonetischen Alphabets: Vorschläge zu einer Revision der systematischen Darstellung der IPA-Tabelle. LINCOM Europa: München.
• List, J.-M. (2017) Network approaches to the reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology. Talk, held at the "Center for Chinese Linguistics" (2017/03/07, Hong Kong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology).

Networks in Chinese poetry

Structure in Poetry

Dealing with poetry is a dangerous topic in science, since we never know whether the structures we propose are really there or not. Once it comes to the search of structure in poetry, Matthew and Luke were right, since the ones who search will find, provided they have enough creativity.

When I had Latin lessons in school, some of my classmates were incredibly diligent in trying to find alliterations (instances in which words in a sentence start with the same letter) in Cicero's speeches. This was less out of interest in the structure of the speeches, but more an attempt to divert the teacher's attention away from translation.

The problem with structure in poetry is that we never know in the end whether the people who created the poetry did things with purpose or not. Consider, for example, the following lines of a famous verse:

Apart from the fact that people might disagree whether songs by Eminem are poetry, it is interesting to look at the structures one may (or may not) detect. We know that rap and hip hop allow for rather loose rhyming schemes, which may give the impression that they were produced in an ad-hoc manner. We know also that the question of what counts as a rhyme is strictly cultural. In German, for example, employ could rhyme with supply (thanks to Goethe and other poets who would superimpose to the standard language rhyme patterns that made sense in their home dialect). If I was given Eminem's poem in an exam, I would mark its rhyming structure as follows:

I do not know whether any teacher of English would agree that music can rhyme with own it, but if Germans can rhyme [ai] (as in supply) with [ɔi] (as in employ), why not allow [ɪk] (as in music) to rhyme with [ɪt] (as in own it)? I bet that if one made an investigation of all rhymes that Bob Dylan has produced so far, we would find at least a few instances where he would tolerate Eminem's rhyme pattern.

The point here is that rhymes are important evidence to infer how Ancient Chinese was pronounced.

The Pronunciation of Ancient Chinese

The Chinese writing system gives only minimal hints regarding the pronunciation of the characters. If one writes a character like 日 which means 'sun', the writing system gives us no clue as to its pronunciation; and from the modern form in which the character is written, it is also difficult to see the image of a sun in the character. Thus, the current situation in Chinese linguistics is that we have very ancient texts, dating at times back to 1000 BC, but we do not have a real clue as to how the language was pronounced by then.

That it was pronounced differently is clear from — ancient Chinese poetry. When reading ancient poems with modern pronunciations, one often finds rhyme patterns which do not sound nice. Consider the poem from Ode 28 of the Book of Odes (Shījīng 詩經), an ancient collection of poems written between 1050 and 600 BC (translation from Karlgren 1950):

Here, we find modern rhymes between fēi and guī which is fine, since the transliteration fails to give the real pronunciation, which is [fəi] versus [kuəi]; but we also find [in] rhyming with [nan], which is so strange (due to the strong difference in the vowels) that even Bob Dylan and Eminem probably would not tolerate it. But if we do not tolerate this rhyming pattern, and if we do not want to assume that the ancient masters of Chinese poetry would simply fail in rhyming, we need to search for some explanation as to why the words do not rhyme. The explanation is, of course, language evolution — The sound systems of languages constantly change, and if things do not rhyme with our modern pronunciation, they may have been perfect rhymes when they were originally created.

When Chinese scholars of the 16th century, who investigated their ancient poetry, became aware of this, they realized that the poetry could be a clue to reconstruct the ancient pronunciation of their language. Then they began to investigate the ancient poems of the Book of Odes systematically for their rhyme patterns. It is thanks to this work on early linguistic reconstruction by Chinese scholars, that we now have a rather clear picture of how Ancient Chinese was pronounced (see especially Baxter 1992, Sagart 1999, and Baxter and Sagart 2014).

Networks in Chinese Rhyme Patterns

But where are the networks in Chinese poetry, which I promised in the title of this post? They are in the rhyme patterns — It is rather straightforward to model rhyme patterns in poetry with the help of networks. Every node is a distinct word that rhymes in at least one poem with another word. Links between nodes are created whenever one word rhymes with another word in a given stanza of a poem. So, even if we take only two stanzas of two poems of the Book of Odes, we can already create a small network of rhyme transitions, as illustrated in the following figure:

One needs, of course, to be careful when modeling this kind of data, since specific kinds of normalizations are needed to avoid exaggerating the weight assigned to specific rhyme connections. It is possible that poets just used a certain rhyme pattern because they found it somewhere else. It is also not yet entirely clear to me how to best normalize those cases in which more than two words rhyme with each other in the same stanza.

But apart from these rather technical questions, it is quite interesting to look at the patterns that evolve from collecting rhyme patterns of all poems found in the Book of Odes, and plotting them in a network. I prepared such a dataset, using the rhyme assessments by Baxter (1992). The whole data set is now available in the form of an interactive web-application at http://digling.org/shijing.

In this application, one can browse all characters that appear in potential rhyme positions in all 305 poems that constitute the Book of Odes. Additional meta-data, like reconstructions for the old pronunciations following Baxter and Sagart (2014), which were kindly provided by L. Sagart, have also been added. The core of the app is the "Poem View", by which one can see a poem, along with reconstructions for the rhyme words, and an explicit account of what experts think rhymed in the classical period, and what they think did not rhyme. The following image gives a screanshot of the second poem of the Book of Odes:

But let's now have a look at the big picture of the network we get when taking all words that rhyme into account. The following image was created with Cytoscape:

As we can see, the rhyme words in the 305 poems almost constitute a small world network, and we have a very large connected component. For me, this was quite surprising, since I was assuming that rhyme patterns would be more distinct. It would be very interesting to see a network of the works of Shakespeare or Goethe, and to compare the amount of connectivity.

There are, of course, many things we can do to analyze this network of Chinese poetry, and I am currently trying to find out to what degree this may contribute to the reconstruction of the pronunciation of Ancient Chinese. But since this work is all in a preliminary stage, I will restrict this post by showing how the big network looks if we color the nodes in six different colors, based on which of the six main vowels ([a, e, i, o, u, ə]) scholars usually reconstruct in the rhyme word for Ancient Chinese:

As can be seen, even this simple annotation shows how interesting structures emerge, and how we see more than before.

Many more things can be done with this kind of data. This is for sure. We could compare the rhyme networks of different poets, maybe even the networks of one and the same poet at different stages of their life, asking questions like: "do people rhyme more sloppy, the older they get?" It's a pity that we don't have the data for this, since we lack automatic approaches to detect rhyme words in text, and there are no manual annotations of poem collections apart from the Book of Odes that I know of.

But maybe, one day, we can use networks to study the dynamics underlying the evolution of literature. We could trace the emergence of rap and hip hop, or the impact of the "Judas!"-call on Dylan's rhyme patterns, or the loss of structure in modern poetry. But that's music from the future, of course.

References

• Baxter, William H. (1992) A handbook of Old Chinese phonology. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Baxter, William H. and Sagart, Laurent (2014) Old Chinese. A new reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Karlren, Bernhard (1950) The Book of Odes. Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities.
• Sagart, Laurent (1999) The roots of Old Chinese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.