| There are four tones both in medieval Chinese and modern Chinese. The latter was derived from the former according to Qing (清)and Zhuo(浊)of the initial consonants. About the law of the evolution of these two parts, there have been some conclusions, which is not specific and systemically. Some of them are not flawless. For example, "one of the characteristic of standard Dialects of southwest China is believed by the linguistics circles that all the medieval characters with Ru tone(入声) were developed into the second tone, YangPing (阳平) in medieval Chinese." But, this law can be turned out too absolutely. From the specific statistics, we can exactly find 8.2% and 9.5% of this tone are not confined by this law separately in Chengdu dialect and Wuhan dialect, that both are representatives of standard Dialects of southwest China. So, this article is going to draw a specific and systemically conclusion based on the object data and analysis. All the statistics were gotten from the recording of the characters' tone both in medieval and modern Chinese one by one given by the book, named the Collections of Chinese Dialects Characters Pronunciations, edited by Chinese Department of Beijing University. This book collects 3000 Chinese characters with the pronunciations both in medieval and modern Chinese about 20 representative dialects, involved in 7 dialects areas. The types of the evolution of the medieval Chinese and modern Chinese concluded by this article also help to prove and mend some settled laws. Also, the characters as the... |
