Research On A Mandarin Phonetic Reader In The Pekinese Dialect

A Mandarin Phonetic Reader in The Pekinese Dialect (hereinafter referred to as Reader), which was published in 1918, is one of the most important works of the celebrated Sweden sinologist Bernhard Karlgren. This book gives a thorough description of the Pekinese phonetics and phonology at the beginning of the twentieth century, including consonants and vowels, tones, tone sandhi, stress and so on. And it also contains a delicate record of 20 Chinese texts, using the dialect alphabet invented by Professor J.-A. Lundell. Being a very precious document of Pekinese back then, it is of great importance for researches on history of Pekinese phonetics, and on tone system and prosody of modern Chinese. However, this book has scarcely been deeply studied by domestic researchers.The purpose of this dissertation is to make this valuable work well known and profitable to more researchers. First of all, I translated the full text of Reader into Chinese. And since that the original phonetic transcription used in this book, ie. the dialect alphabet is not widely used and is not easy for most researchers to accept and recognize, I transliterated the phonetic transcription used in the book into IPA letters. After that, I rearranged and commented on the content of Reader, referring to lots of relevant literature. Then I did some deep study on some important phonetic phenomena recorded in this book, in order to find the relationship between Pekinese in Reader and that of present time.Besides the introduction, there are five chapters in this dissertation:In the first chapter I give an introduction of Reader's writing structure and remarkable characteristics.In the second chapter I analyze the Pekinese phonology in Reader, including initials, finals and tones. Because that the author of Reader never gives phonemes of the various phones, I also generalized its vowel phonemes. And according to the description of Pekinese tones shown by Reader, I find that the tone system in Reader is closer to that in the dialect of Hejian, than that of modern Pekinese.In the third chapter, I analyze the prosody features shown by Reader, including tone sandhi, stress and quantity. The Reader assumes that prosody, especially stress takes a very important place in Pekinese. In this chapter, I give comments on the author's view of prosody, and analyze the prosody hierarchy of the transcription given by Reader. In the fourth chapter, I study on some important phonetic phenomena recorded in Reader, like the pronunciation of the final er, the grammatical meanings corresponding to le and liao, the evolvement process of the three finals e\o\uo, and so on.In the last chapter, I give a discussion about the nature and value of Reader.And the whole translation of Reader is attached to the end of this dissertation, for the use of reference.Summing up the above, A Mandarin Phonetic Reader in The Pekinese Dialect is a very valuable work about Pekinese of a century ago. My research on this work will be very helpful for more people to know this work and benefit from it.