 So the first thing is, nobody suspects me of being a phonologist and therefore I need correction after my talk, so the discussion will take the form of instructing me on my mistakes. And secondly, I would like to suggest that the old Chinese is described in great detail in two works that are missing in the new reconstruction. I believe that Hua Xuecheng, Zhou Qin, Han Jin, Fang Yan, Yin Jiu Shi is a uniquely rich semblance of all the material that should have been considered, I think. And this book would be by far the most rich source for it. Even more striking is, but of course not available for at the time of writing. The new reconstruction is Wang Zheping. This is an extraordinary thing which I recently received of terrific interest. So it is Chu Tu Wenxian, Yu Xian Jin, Yang Hai, Fang Yan, that is a very a thing which then goes systematically beyond Hua Xuecheng who is a student of our good friend Liu Guoyao. And Liu Guoyao has written a terrifically useful summary of Hua Xuecheng's findings that I find in itself is a small monographic contribution and an introduction to this work. So Wang Zheping says Yin Xia. This I think puts my point, I don't have more to say and I think that more of this kind of material might have been recommended to readers if not used in the book if you see what I mean. Then we have Fang Yan which is even by my teacher and friend Liu Guoyao who wrote extensively on it interpreted as local language and so on as I understand him. And I think that is a misreading of the ancient Chinese. Fang Yu does exist also and would be a language and Fang Yan are actually local words and Fang Yan is therefore a list of words and not a description of a language. I say probably you see I have discussed it with many of our linguist colleagues and there is actually a very general suspicion that we have read new Fang Yan into old Fang Yan in two wrong ways. One is not anymore current which is to simply say Fang Yan in ancient Chinese is dialect which it is not this local language but that local language itself is again a mistake because it has language which would be Yu and not Yan so that is an idea which may be wrong but so we now have some other issues here. I have two indispensable works on morphology which I think if we look at what we are told about derivation by tone change or by S addition suffixation if that is the solution we want to subscribe to that everybody shares then so Yu Wen and especially Xie Wei Wei, Han Yu, Yin Jian, Goi Zi, Yan Jiao you know are a wealth of materials that should have been I think could have greatly changed the description of S suffixation in classical Chinese I must say. I mean I have studied this for decades I learned the furious amount from these books and because these were theses by students Sun Yu Wen actually got many prizes for this book and I think that Xie Wei Wei richly deserves similar prizes for his thesis these are two young scholars I don't think they're more than much more than 30 or something you know and I think they're doing excellent work and I'm just trying to be useful I you know I think it would help to take to at least remind the readers of our new reconstruction that there are these works that tell a great deal more about S suffixation than is in the book then there is a very nice statement by you see Jiang Xinfu, Gu Ren Wu Yun Shu, Shi Zhi Yun, Ge Sui Qi, Fang Yin or Shu Yin they each follow the Fang Yin and I miss the expression Fang Yin in the new reconstruction because I think it is correct as Lin Yu Tang learned from August Conradie in Leipzig when he wrote his thesis there that the phenomenon of yes the phenomenon of Fang Yin local variant pronunciation is crucial for the kind of unneedness that was mentioned a moment ago in the rhyming and of course Lin Yu Tang in his Lu Nguan Ji Yuan Lu Nguan Ji has I think five or six important articles on Fang Yin Shu Yan so I won't bother you anymore with this I think it's just useful to remember to my mind it is useful to remember that there is this extensive research on Fang Yin as opposed to Fang Yin which might have been brought to bear there is a question I have on the very term reconstruction Wang Li prefers to be nice and he uses nice nitsa literally a draft guess to Chu Yin and I just want to since he is a colleague of mine in bedan so on and I've known him and so on it is very interesting that he sounds very dogmatic but in fact I have forgotten to put in the quotation but he puts very explicitly he rejects the term Chu Yin and dislikes it and prefers nitsa and thinks that it is if you are thinking of your things as hypotheses it's a very good idea to call them that you see to to to use a terminology that does not have this kind of way I found Wang Li's comments here really rather moving you see because he really felt that me and sir yes you see yes unfortunately in a language like Chinese with the kind of data we have we cannot move much beyond this is his thought the next point I have is that middle Chinese is said to be reconstructed to be transcribed and I think that Egerrod already in 55 put it bluntly and correctly only the modern dialect will provide material for reconstructing actual values for many elements such as initial and so on so on this is uncontroversial and moreover the what we reconstruct depends on what dialects we look at and on many many other things especially of course a very long history of reconstruction of middle Chinese that we can trace even Shakespeare's pronunciation was reconstructed I was going to carry to you a Helge Kökertz Shakespeare's pronunciation and I only recommend that if you if you are going to speak of the philosophy of writing please read this book of the great professor of Yale Helge Kökertz he became very famous in Shakespeare studies this is a classic it's a very beautiful book I wish I had taken it so there you get problematization of for example computability of what rhymes that what doesn't rhyme you see of course rejected because of the conventional nature of rhyming conventions that are cultural and that can actually link very distant things as was mentioned a moment ago and as is very common in German and so on so I just mentioned it I hope you don't misunderstand me I'm not saying this should have been in the book but I am saying that we would be talking that making better sense about the problems of rhyming in literature if we had in the backs of our minds this fantastically readable book it is riveting I'm not a phonologist and I have read large swathes of this book with great pleasure and so there it is the very substantial evidence there is for performing his reconstruction has been found radically insufficient for the task so no magic formula exists by means of which we can single out eye rhymes in Shakespeare that's a harsh statement and I assure you we have lots and lots of books about the pronunciation at the time and still we cannot in literature be sure you know I assure you that we could discuss rhyming in Shijin at a much better level if we actually have a commonly reading books of this order and if we used Wang Xian Shijin Yunpu which of course is 2002 or something and which gives you the 249 rhyme sheen schemes in Shijin and so on and has a remark which I find very helpful it would take more than his 500 page book to justify a description of rhymes in each case because it is in fact a literary decision also it is a philological decision it is not a computational matter so that is what he thinks and I must say I just do a permit myself to agree so the Middle Chinese transcription in the new reconstruction basically the same as in bills explicitly replaces Kagram's phonetic reconstruction with an attempt as chronological reconstruction I will come back to that take Xian first and Xian immortal where Bill by the way has my sympathy for not respecting the Kagram's opposition and this is an explicit refusal in the new reconstruction to transcribe what Lufa Yan tried to register in the spirit of the famous dictum which goes like this Paul C. Holly Fenbier and then Shu Lei don't ask me but it does mean what I hear say apparently it's a very curious thing I find it almost a teaser I don't know but it does mean that and everybody agrees and this is the phoneticism of Lufa Yan and it is converted into a phonological explicitly because in fact it is of course it's a very honest honestly down but you can't at the same time replace a phonetic analysis with a phonemic one and say that you are just transcribing what the other guy is doing so we have Zhizin you see which of course is what Lufa Yan would transcribe the word Zhizin for and standard Russian orthography is phonemic here and follows a different strategy which has fine but certainly which is very fine but certainly not a transcription of the early sources so Lufa Yan would definitely try Zhiz to live as Zhiz because that is how it is pronounced you have to have some operation in your throat to say I can't do it if you are down there you know you want to say you are very clearly saying Zhiz before you have said good morning so that is my so Rime then which is taken by Bill to be the one of the important arguments for transcribing them as the same it goes nowhere to prove phonetic identity or closeness it's very obvious not very comfortable to remind you of that but it's very clear and in any case I have to say that Lufa Yan knew this and and Bill and Laurent as I see it did not quite realize that this is not an argument you see and that if they are going to transcribe Lufa Yan's effort then they must transcribe his phonetic not they must transcribe this as Zhiz and not as Zhiz which is what I do so that's how I take it in Middle Chinese we have one phone with three alophones and we have one e which with three alophones and one with two alophones and so on and all this is of course raises this question everywhere we are told in on page I don't we have it here we are told that the in about the inadequacies of Cargren's phonological reconstruction which made it difficult to identify patterns involved I think I want to go quickly over this let me just remind you that Cargren never used the word term chronology in the in the Tsubet's coin sense except to malign and to in fact reject grotesque with grotesque enmity all manner of phonology he was an anti-phonologist of the first order and my dear teacher CERN Egerwood had his thesis not actually not examined by Cargren because in his thesis he mentioned the word phoneme that is the story as Egerwood had it so there is no such thing and the word phonology used before the prince Troubet's coin does not refer to Troubet's coin phonology so it is true enough that Cargren wrote a book on phonology if you like on phonology she was but it is a grotesque misunderstanding of one of the main features of Cargren's work and here is a Troubet's coin the prince whose brother by the way I think died in a Ferrari accident in in Paris so this is a really quite a family I'm sorry not relevant so then I have something to I really think this is not very important about Cargren's phonology but it is a very major part of the history of the study of old Chinese certainly and old Chinese and proto-Chinese indistinguishable it is distinguished in this it is difficult at this stage to make a meaningful distinction between old Chinese and proto-Chinese this I believe is a serious category confusion unlike Indo-European a real form of speech current on the Eurasian or Anatolian grassy steps a few millennia ago the reconstructed proto-Indo-European parent language is not a concrete historical fact rather it is a very recent hypothetical construct or an abstract scheme a set of formulae from which properties of the extant daughter languages can hopefully be derived more or less successful to say that these are hard to distinguish is is unfortunate if this is the right interpretation but of course it may not be the right interpretation so I go on first to say very clearly that Louis James Liu on King's ball theory in school legacy also known as a proligomena and both are equally unreadable I do not recommend James Liu as linguistic prose neither in Danish nor in English but he had a very clear vision of this the Indo-European is in his terms a semiotic and proto-Indo-European is a meta semiotic so one thing is a is a semiotic system and the other is a description of it it is about it hence the word meta and so not be able to distinguish between these two would be to be seriously categorically at Stephen Colvin my dear friends from across the street says this is a basic category mistake all Chinese is an attested cultural artifact and proto-Chinese a fairly dodgy constant um put it more well he is more English than I am more smoothly than I would have been able to put it um so perhaps then the newer English instruction intends all Chinese here to be used in the narrow technical sense referred to the earliest stage of Chinese that we can reconstruct from Chinese evidence that's that's a possibility but in that case we have a plain tautology the earliest stage of Chinese we can reconstruct for Chinese being defined as being exactly proto-Chinese they would be telling us essentially that they find it difficult to stay at this stage to distinguish between proto-Chinese and proto-Chinese if that is the the interpretation we can discuss this you know I'm just desperately trying to understand what is can be meant right this cannot be meant so then thirdly what if what they intend is two historical phenomena one that is attested in the early Chinese texts and the other imagined as a concrete manifestation of the proto-Chinese system they reconstruct as the common ancestor of all later varieties of Chinese in this case now in this case that does make sense and if true it would be important that these two should be could be shown by compelling evidence to coincide and that is an open it is an issue we can discuss but I think if that is the meaning it could have been expressed a little less um misunderstanding so but our early earliest texts the oracle bone inscriptions dating from the 14s according to Chiusi Gui whatever I don't care throw relatively little light on matters of phonology certainly not enough on their for on their basis alone to reconstruct phonological system underlying them for this we badly need the much later oats David Keeley puts it in his inevitable spirited way he was a journalist you know he grew up as a journalist the inscriptions tell us so little about their sound that the problem of the pronunciation of shun graphs has been declared near insurmountable and Takashima yesterday conquered and so there we go to conclude on this reading the the new reconstruction statement would at least make sense unfortunately it would be untrue but at least it makes sense it is just not right so I think I've said some outrageous things and displayed enough of my ignorance of phonology for corrections to be in order we have how many do we have for discussion