On the four grades / four calls of Chinese rime tables
GeorgOrlandi
Italian School of East Asian Studies
Summary
The present paper seeks to discuss and clarify the notions of ‘Grades’ and ‘Calls’ of traditional Chinese rime tables, which are commonly related to the presence or absence of glides, and continue to be taken as a basis for reconstructing vocalic and semi-vocalic portions of the post-initial elements in medieval and pre-medieval Chinese syllables. It is argued that, based on the discussions of Grades/Calls by Chinese scholars of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, they were probably conceived as degrees of stricture of the phonatory apparatus, with progressive narrowing of the articulatory aperture, from wide and open to narrow and close. It is concluded that the linguistic perspective underpinning the classification of “sounds” in the linguistic tradition of China appears to be remarkably close to concepts long held in other linguistic traditions.
In the whole horizon of Chinese historical linguistics there is perhaps no greater controversy to be found anywhere than in the notion of Grades, also referred to as Divisions, Levels or Ranks. Their interpretation has puzzled both Chinese and foreign (Western, Japanese) scholars for a long time, and a real consensus has yet to be reached about how they should be interpreted. It is generally agreed that the notion of Grades was used to distinguish medieval Chinese syllables on the basis of the presence (or absence) of certain medial glides, albeit there is disagreement on which were the Grades that were distinguished by those glides and how they should be phonemically reconstructed. Some authors reconstruct palatal glides for Grades III and IV (Karlgren 1915–1926; Baxter, 1992; Baxter and Sagart, 2014), whereas others for Grades II and III (Zhèngzhāng, 2003; Pān, 2000). Still others contend that the four Grades were related to vowel warping (Schuessler, 2006: 83–96), to physical description of tongue heights as visually observed from outside the mouth (Chan, 2006: 37–46), or to a difference in register and degree of velarization (Ferlus, 2009). Given that there is no consensus about which explanation is more plausible and which should be rejected, the presence of two or more conflicting models creates a preposterous situation that corresponds more or less as if in physics caloric theory and thermodynamics or Ptolemy’s law of refraction and Snell’s law coexisted on equal terms. Whilst it is not denied that some of these possible theories about the interpretation of the nature of Grades are fascinating and perhaps even partially correct, it is also demonstrated that they are probably mistaken from an epistemological point of view. An alternative, more epistemologically-grounded theory is also offered in the remainder of this paper. However, before recapitulating the intellectual history of the notion of Grades, some technical notions of the Chinese rime tables must be explained in greater detail.
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