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This chapter offers a systematic treatment of Old Chinese word onsets. Following a definition of the notion of onset within Old Chinese word structure and a presentation of the consonant system, it reviews general processes that affected the history of Chinese: pharyngealization, palatalization, retroflexion, and secondary voicing. The comparative evidence about Old Chinese phonology coming from archaic dialects and contact languages is discussed. A new account of Proto-Mĭn initial consonants and of their evolution to modern dialects is presented, which assumes two separate episodes of initial devoicing. A general scheme showing what inferences can be drawn from the combined evidence of archaic dialects and contact languages is laid out. Then the different types of onsets are discussed: singleton onsets, onsets with tightly attached preinitials, and onsets with loosely attached preinitials. Onsets are classified according to their preinitial material and their manner of articulation. Examples for each reconstructed onset are presented. The sound correspondences between Old Chinese onsets and their Middle Chinese, Proto-Mĭn, Proto-Hmong-Mien, and Vietnamese reflexes are tabulated according to onset type.

This chapter shows that, typologically, Old Chinese (OC) was a mixed language, in terms of both language type and word order. It shows that the verb-object (VO) order was preferred by Chinese language evolution while the object-verb (OV) order fell into disuse or only survives in expressions and proverbs. It demonstrates why a spatial orientation term and a place word which share the same semantic property [location] needed a preposition in Middle Chinese but not in OC. Verbs preceding localizers or place words were progressively grammaticalized into prepositions. Consequently, locations which has, for example, localizers and place words were marked and became different from ordinary NP. The motion verb qù changed its meaning from ‘to leave’ to ‘to go’ in this reorganization of word order.

This chapter introduces the phonology of Sinitic languages, both in a diachronic and in a synchronic perspective. It first proposes an overview of the peculiar methodology for the reconstruction of earlier historical stages of Chinese, followed by a short presentation of the salient phonological features of Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin. It then discusses some general issues concerning Sinitic phonology, including the relevance of syllables and the representation of tones, and presents the phonology of Modern Standard Chinese and of each dialect group. Specifically, it provides a more extensive presentation of the national standard, while for dialects it is limited to a discussion of the most relevant features which characterize each group (and major subgroups).

Chapter 2 details the sources of evidence used in the reconstruction of Old Chinese. Section 2.1 introduce Middle Chinese, a system of pronunciation of Chinese characters widely used in China in the 6th century CE, known to us through phonetic annotations in contemporary dictionaries and commentaries of classic texts. A series of tables present the elements of Middle Chinese syllable structure, including tones, initial consonants, and finals, and gives the conventional transcription we use to represent them. Section 2.2 discusses the issues involved in extracting information from Old Chinese poetic rhyming, most of it from the Book of Odes. Section 2.3 describes how phonological information about pronunciation can be inferred from the Chinese script; examples are given to illustrate the inferences suggested by newly available paleographic evidence. Section 2.4 introduces the phonologically conservative Mĭn, Kèjiā and Wăxiāng dialects, and section 2.5 describes the languages of the Vietic, Hmong-Mien and Kra-Dai families that contain layers of Old Chinese loanwords. Section 2.6 discusses the evidence on Old Chinese pronunciation that can be inferred from explicit comments in classical Chinese texts. Finally, in section 2.7 the authors warn against using evidence from related Tibeto-Burman languages to test hypotheses on Old Chinese phonology.