 And the emphasis of this presentation is on the primary sources and methodology. And because Middle Chinese is kind of the major in on all Chinese or one of the major ins on all Chinese, it will be mostly about Middle Chinese. So here goes. So we'll look at sources and methods, as I said. So for sources, and let's say, if these terms, any term like rhyme table isn't meaningful to you yet, just wait and we'll get to it. So one source is the rhyme tables. Another source are the rhyme books. Those are both about Middle Chinese. Then we get to the practice of early poetry. Now this is sort of direct evidence of all Chinese and the structure of the Chinese script itself, which is also gives you some phonetic information about all Chinese. And I want to emphasize that these four sources are used by all practitioners of all Chinese historical phonology. And then Baxter and Sagar, in particular, and other people to a lesser extent, use loanwords into non-synetic languages and other ancillary evidence. But these are really the pillars of all Chinese reconstruction. So let's look at the rhyme tables first. So there was a book, a rhyme table, called The Yun Jing, published in 1161 by a Mr. Zhang Lin Zhi. And the same year, it was a good year for rhyme tables, an almost identical book called Oh, there's some kind of typo in the title. It's the Jing Yun Lui by Zheng Xiao, which was part of this large reference work, this encyclopedia called The Tong Zhi. So these are what we mean when we say rhyme tables, these two books. So what information is given in the rhyme tables? They're a way to give phonetic information about how to read Chinese characters. So there is a rhyme category, an initial category, a rank. And this is one of the, let's say, less obvious terms in Chinese historical phonology, which we'll come back to. And then whether or not the syllable in question has a medial w, which is called He Keo. So that means closed mouth, because when you have a w, you go, yeah. And then if you don't have a w, then you go, ah, so that's open mouth. And that's called Kai Keo. So in case that's a factor. And that's it. So this is the information about Chinese pronunciation that's given explicitly in these books. Rhyme category, initial category, rank, and whether or not the syllable has a medial w. So here is chart 23 from the Yun Jing. And let's just look at it. It's a grid. So what you have across the top are the place and manner of articulation of the initial. And what you have down the side are the rhyme categories. And then you see that down the side, those rhyme categories are broken into four rows. So is everyone seeing the thing I'm describing? Yeah. So those four rows are called the ranks. That's what I'm calling the ranks. So there's a very important, I think this is super, super important epistemological point that I'm making, which is when we talk about rhymes and initials and ranks and hook up Kai Keo, we are talking about what you are looking at. Like we're talking about the mise en page of a specific book from the 12th century. And that is what things are built on. So when I say that this is a rank one voiced dental initial or something like that, I mean it's on this page, in this column, in this row of this book. Now you notice that there are some blank spots. That's because syllables of that structure do not exist in Middle Chinese. So this is an analysis of, you can say, Middle Chinese phonotactics. Now the, I wonder whether I get into this. Yeah, okay, well we'll see. The thing I want to say then is, so this is from the Yunqing. This is from the Qiyin Lue and I don't know, if you care to look, you will see that it's the same characters, yeah, with the same holes in the same places. So they clearly are like part of the same philological research tradition and, you know, have a shared source, but we don't know what it is. Yeah, or I mean I don't want to overstate that, there's research into that. But very conveniently for us, these two books use different terminology. So the Yunqing actually gives like place and manner of articulation in a way that's analogous to contemporary terminology. So you have things like the teeth sounds, yeah, or the top of the tongue sounds, yeah. So you get articulatory terminology, whereas the Qiyin Lue, it uses, I think the technical term is acrophonic terms. So it, you know, you can almost say like, you know, if this were in English, you would say something like the ball sound or something like that, to mean B, yeah. So it uses a word as an example of the category in order to name the category. So that's nice because the two documents use different terminology, but they're structured the same way, they have the same information in them, and then that's a way that gives us a kind of concrete phonetic interpretation of the information that's being given. So those are the rhyme tables. It's not an easy question. So what I would say is ranks mean what's going on in the page format of this book. So I wonder if I, I mean, I don't know how to do this, but let's just look together at the very upper left corner of this page. You see there's a blank spot, okay. So that blank spot is in rank one, yeah, and then the blank spot immediately below it is in rank two, and the character that I think is pronounced my Chinese is terrible, but a run is in rank three, and then there's a blank spot in rank four. So the ranks really just refers to what row in the page formatting of this document, a character appears in. Now, then the question is, well, why did they put different characters in different rows? And there are people out there, you know, this is not the majority opinion, but there are people out there who say, well, because the page was too short to fit all the characters on one row, so they, you know, they put it on four rows, yeah. So that's not the majority opinion, but it gives you a sense that this is a hard problem. Now, the thing that's nice is from the, and you'll see this in a few minutes, from the perspective of all Chinese reconstruction, it kind of ends up not mattering. But from the perspective of the phonetic interpretation of middle Chinese, it's a very important and very hotly contested question. Nothing to do with that one. It has to, like, okay, you know, you're trying to get me to talk about something that cannot be talked about. But the answer is it has something to do with vowel quality or medial. The answer is kind of no for methodological reasons, which is to say the language, the way language is changed and or learned is from people speaking with their parents and speaking with their friends in the schoolyard and the effect of a prescriptive philological document on actual social behavior is highly, highly mediated. So there are examples, you know, like in English, in my dialect of English, we say wolf, whereas any historical linguist would tell us we should drop an L in that position, like we do in half, and that's the influence of the writing. So, you know, a written tradition can impinge on the development of a spoken language, but only in extremely circumscribed ways that I think played very little role in the history of Chinese. So what is the case is, unfortunately, modern Chinese dialectology takes the rhyme tables as their point of departure, where basically what you do is you take, you know, this as a form and you go and you ask someone to pronounce all the characters. And that gives you a certain amount of information about Chinese dialectology, but is a highly, let's say, particular research methodology that is non-standard in dialectology as an international discipline. So yeah, like we have to think very carefully about the, about how to put it, about imputing phonetic realism onto an abstract object. That's, I think, the way I would put it. So I would say it's, in a sense, a good question, but we would need to think about how to even go about interpreting the meaning of the question, like what kind of evidence would bear on pinpointing whether the labial feature of a Okka syllable is associated with the initial or is associated with the rhyme. And what I would say is, from the perspective of the rhyme tables, you know, this is done at a more abstract level, right? Like let's just look at this page in front of us and say, on the right, in the vertical column you see at the far right, the very last character is Kai. So that means all of the syllables on this page are, let's say, minus labial, right? That's like, we can think of it that way. The, like, it could have been that the feature, Okkaiko, by the author of this book was put in the top, in which case that person would have been saying that in his analysis it was a feature of the initial. Or it could have been put on the left, in which case that person's interpretation would have been that it was a feature of the rhymes. So what I would say is, from the perspective that the source material presents us with, it's a feature of the whole syllable. And that's, you know, fine from, like, let's say if you're a structuralist, that's a perfectly fine answer. So, like, I'll maybe leave it there. That's an excellent question. And I will answer it in two ways. One is, as we're about to see, the point of the rhyme tables, like the social function of the rhyme tables in the moment that they were published has to be understood. And that has to do with probably writing poetry. I mean, I think there was an analytical component of, like, just someone wanted to analyze the, you know, what we would say, the synchronic phonology of probably the prestige reading dialect of that person. But that's one angle, is we need to think about the social meaning of the philological act at the time and place in which it was done, and recognize that it was already participating in, like, for us, it's the starting point in terms of the most concrete information about pronunciation as early as available and as systematic as possible. But from the perspective of the Chinese philological tradition, this is a very, you know, late occurrence. And so there's a kind of, you know, a kind of, like, complicated dialectical relationship with, like, we're looking for, you know, the earliest, most informative source material for some kind of positive information about language at the time. But the primary sources are instead kind of feeding us a evolving philological tradition as it happens to be preserved by chance. So that's kind of the first comment. The second one is it then becomes a methodological question for us. And what I would say is it's a useful methodologically to assume that all sources point to the same, to use, you know, these are source term, etat de long, right, like the same structure. And is that true? Of course it's not true. It's an absurdity. It's, of course, not true. But it's by assuming that all of the primary sources are talking about the same structure that we discover those places where they are not, right? That's the methodological point. That if you assume that you're looking at noise and, oh, each document probably is another dialogue. If you make the assumption of heterogeneity, you will find no structure. Whereas if you make the assumption of structure, you will find heterogeneity. So I think that's the methodological principle that I would emphasize. Okay, so now moving on to the rhyme books. So we're moving backwards in time now. Okay, so the rhyme books, there would have been earlier material and Mr. Lu Fa Yan refers to this. But for all intents and purposes, we can think of the rhyme books as an interlocking genre of philological reference works that all descend from the Che Yun, which was written in 601. Okay, yeah. And then I'll just say, just kind of charming, the story, which I think is a literary can see to a large extent, is that Lu Fa Yan attended, when he was kind of a young man, he attended a party that his father put on, where all of the greats and the good were there. And they discussed kind of what is good practice in writing good poetry. And they really, they talked about, okay, well, what about this character? What about this character? And then he sort of listened in and then many, many years later, he sort of published the natural outcome of this party conversation, which is his reference work that tells you how to pronounce Chinese characters for use in elegant poetic composition. So hit that book, doesn't really exist anymore, unfortunately. So the oldest complete copy of it, or edition of it, is this Kan Mie Bu Chi Che Yun. Sorry, my Chinese is so awful, but, which was published in 706 by Wang Ren Shu. And this book was also lost for a long time, but a copy was found in the Library of the Imperial Palace in the 40s. So most philological research before the 1940s didn't use it because they didn't know it existed anymore. But it is now the oldest available complete rhyme book. And then the kind of go-to standard before the 1940s and still largely to this day, although I think that's a little bit sloppy because we have an older source, is the Guan Yun, which was published in 107, 108 under Imperial patronage. And it has loads of characters in it. You know, each of these gets one of the things that happens is the rhyme books get bigger as people add more and more characters in successive editions. There's an excellent article that is very, very recently published in the Bolton of Chinese Linguistics that I can send you if you like, that discusses the sort of philology of the rhyme books in terms of, you know, what are the differences between each edition? How have they been preserved? And whatnot that is, I think, a really nice piece of work that I can share with you. But also there's this wonderful home page that you can, I don't know, I mean, click on if you want, that gives, I mean, it's really great. It gives like parallel passages in the different editions of the rhyme books, often with photographs and so on. So now, you know, those of you or some of you at least are saying like, Oh, great, there are some books that were written at certain times and we published and some of them exist and some of them don't. But what the hell are in these books? Yeah. So here is a page of beginning of one of the volumes of the Cheyoon. And this is in the first edition. This is the six. I mean, I'm simplifying a little tiny bit, but this is the original edition, which unfortunately only exists in scraps, yeah, from Dunhuang mostly. But, you know, then we can at least know what it was like. And here is my transcription of this page. So, you know, if you're like me, you look at this and it's kind of somehow inconvenient to read. So I've transcribed it and here it is. And I think it's very useful to, you know, I don't know for this is the lesson of me banging my head against the wall. It's very easy when you dip into Chinese historical phonology to become mesmerized by the the technical terminology and the debates over things like what are the ranks and whatnot. So I think it's really useful to know exactly what the relevant primary sources actually contain. So let's look at this a little bit. And I'll just look at this translation on the right. So it says there are 54 level tone rhymes. So each of the volumes of the book is a different tone. And then within the volume, so we're in the level tone volume, then we organize it into sort of sections, which are according to the tones. And then within the sorry, according to the rhymes, and then within each rhyme section, it's according to a syllable. And then you have a list of characters that represent that syllable in and those are called syllable groups. Okay, so here we're looking at this almost the table of contents of this volume. So it says there are 54 level tone rhymes. And then it lists them. So here I it lists 10. And it lists them using this form of phonetic annotation that we will see a lot called fancy where it's where where you represent one syllable by giving it two syllables as a gloss. I use the following English example, we say bone equals bake plus phone. So the point is that we analyze the syllable bone as starting with the same initial as the be in bake and having the same rhyme as the own in phone. And this is what we have here. So you see the the first so we have one tone talk plus home. So it's saying, I am naming the rhyme category tone. As a as a technical term. And how is it pronounced? You wonder, ah, the character tone is pronounced talk plus home. And then second one. I am naming the next category in my book tone. It's as a name of the rhyme. Yeah. And how do you pronounce the character tone? It's two plus song. Yeah. And okay. Broadly speaking, I think people are with me. So now let's look at a page from the 704 edition. And just as an aside. This is in this is in my book. This is in my book. This is not in my book because I was only at the time able to get my hands on an extremely blurry picture. And the publisher said, oh, no, we don't want to publish that blurry picture. It's useless. Whereas now I have access to a very beautiful reproduction of this book. So if if you want it, you can ask me for it. And I feel both happy and sad because happy now that I have this nice reproduction sad that I wasn't able to include a picture of it in my book. So here is the page from the book and it's transcription on the right. But for those of us who have a little trouble reading Chinese, let's look at the translation. Okay. So now in terms of the chronology, the thing we first looked at is the is the 602 edition. And this is the seven, I think 704 edition. But we're also talking about different part of the book. We were looking at the table of contents. And this is like an actual entry, like kind of deep in the book. Yeah. So we say, yeah, this is a one of the one of the syllable groups. So we're talking about words that are pronounced, yeah. So then it gives the analysis of the actual pronunciation of the syllable as I just explained using the fan system. So go plus get that means get also pronounced get now this also pronounced is not referring to all the words. It's only referring to the first character. So it's a say it's a it's very highly compressed way of imparting information. It says I'm using this character to name this category of syllable. But by the way, this character has another pronunciation. And then it gives you, you know, some information about the writing, it says, oh, it's a it's a vulgar. There's also a vulgar way of writing it. Okay, total of nine characters have the pronunciation. Yeah. And then it gives the character, and it gives its meaning, it's already given the pronunciation, right, they're all pronounced yet. Right. And then it says, okay, so we have this character, which is a name of a precious stone. And we have this character, which means to ride a horse. We have this character, which is like a crow, but with three heads and six tails. So some kind of myth, a lot of logical animal. Then we have this character, which is the ghost of a small child that also has another pronunciation, which is, oh, I don't, I don't give it for some reason, that's a mistake of mine. And then we have a curved stone that also has another pronunciation. Yeah. And then we have a name of a mountain that also has another pronunciation. So, so now you have a sense of what this book looks like, right, you have the volume, according to tone, the sort of chapter, according to rhyme care, sorry, rhyme category, then you have the section according to syllable. And then under each syllable, it lists characters that are pronounced the same as each other. But it gives you little also indications of other pronunciations that those particular characters can have. And importantly, those pronunciations, generally speaking, are found in the correct place in the book, with a cross reference back to this place. Yeah. So, so that's the information we have in the rhyme books. Now, one thing that you can say is it's, it's like the phonetic information is less accessible in a kind of schematic way than it was in the rhyme tables you saw. And we're not given information like this is a voiced velar or this is a nasal final. It's much more murky and indirect than that and relies on you knowing the language already, so being able to read these annotations. Okay. So, what is the phonetic information available to us in the rhyme books? Okay, we have the tone because we know what volume it's in. We have the rhyme category because we know what, you know, chapter it's in. And then we have what I'm calling initial chains, which I'll get to in a moment. But it's because these, these, these annotations where it says, you know, it says, what was my example bone is bake plus phone. Well, now I know that bone and bake have the same initial and then I can look up bake and it will say, bake is, you know, bulgar plus cake. And then I can look up bulgar and you can make a little chain of initials. So that's what these initial chains are, which are called in Chinese, that's a modern term. Yeah. And then we have the, the divisions, which I will, I will just not say anything about at the moment, but say they have a kind of relationship to the ranks that I talked about in the rhyme tables and I'll get back to them. And then an important point I want to make is this hukou kaiko distinction is not recoverable from the rhyme books. It's only recoverable from the rhyme tables. There's, there's no direct way that I can figure out using the Che Yun, whether a syllable is hukou or kaiko. So one thing that, you know, you're, you're going to learn about historical Chinese phenology is that it's like epistemologically extremely messy, right? Because if I'm looking at a character and I want to know it's, it's pronunciation, I can know it's tone from 602, but whether or not it has a labial medial, I medial, I can only know from a 12th century source. So the time and the space get very messy, which is why I think methodologically speaking, we should assume that unless there's a reason to think otherwise, we're talking about the same language. Okay, so right, I think maybe even this is a good place to stop because that was all about middle Chinese phenology. And middle Chinese is one of the inputs into old Chinese. And what I'm going to now move on to in the presentation are the other inputs into old Chinese. But that's kind of different topic. And we, we looks like we only have five minutes left. So I think maybe that's a good place to leave off. And to just say that the course is not about middle Chinese. So for most intents and purposes, you can take what you've already been seeing, where's an example? Oh, yeah, yeah, here you see I have a romanization of the Chinese characters, that romanization is into Baxter's middle Chinese transcription system. And just an important point to make it Baxter has not his aim is not to provide a reconstruction of middle Chinese. So these questions like what exactly does hook oh mean and where is the label feature, he's not worried about that at all. He's just looking for a systematic romanization of the information that's contained in the rhyme books and the rhyme tables. So, so the point is kind of purely, if you like, that for, for many audiences, seeing roman letters, it's kind of easier on the eye and more transparent than looking at the, the, the, the, I mean, looking at the Chinese characters, because also like a Chinese character doesn't contain the information about where it's found in the rhyme tables and the rhyme books. So you would have to gloss it with actually there's a, there's a system of six other Chinese characters where you say, okay, what's its rhyme category, what's its tone, what's, what's its rank, so on. So, so the, so Baxter has provided this convenient romanization system, which you can think of as, if you like, containing, again, no phonetic information per se. It's just a paraphrase of these systematic categories of the rhyme books and the rhyme tables into roman letters. So the, the, the point I'm saying is if you want to worry about the details of all Chinese, sorry, middle Chinese phonology, you're welcome to, but if you don't want to worry about them, you can treat Baxter's romanization as a kind of philologically attested representation of a pronunciation and then worry about things like, you know, was the g pronounced g, right, in the same way that you would with Greek and Latin. That's, that's kind of Baxter's goal is to reduce the use of the rhyme tables and the rhyme books as philological sources to the same kind of problem you have of phonetic interpretation when dealing with an alphabetic representation of a language. So that's, I don't know, that's just something to really sort of hammer home because a lot of people criticize Baxter for saying like, you shouldn't write that with an o because it wasn't pronounced o, it was pronounced o, yeah, and that misses the point entirely. He's, he's, he's just trying to represent the categorical information of these two categories of philological sources in a convenient alphabetical representation.