The voiced and released stop codas of Old Chinese
上古汉语的浊爆破塞韵尾

Abstract 摘要

This paper discusses the property of voicing and releasing in coda stops in Old Chinese, which is of great significance to the phonetic types and historical comparison between Chinese and Tibetan Languages. The nature of Old Chinese is mainly based on the historical comparison between Chinese and Tibetan Languages and Chinese loan words in other languages. For example, in Ancient Tibetan the stop codas were transcribed to voiced letters. The majority of bound function words in Classical Tibetan have two variants based on whether the preceding codas are voiced or not. The /-l(-r)/ coda in the ancient Chinese northern languages and early Sanskrit-Chinese phonetic transcription comes from the /-d/ coda. Old Chinese loan words in Japanese have voiced stop codas. Modern Chinese dialects also have voiced stop codas. In addition, stop codas in Tibetan Xigaze, Balti, Lajiao and other dialects, Xifan yiyu and Qiang languages all have the nature of releasing. The “broken tone” in Chinese is caused by a released glottal stop.

本文提出上古汉语塞音韵尾具有带浊爆破的性质，这对于汉藏语的语音类型以及历史比较都有重要意义。得出上古汉语具备此性质的主要依据是汉藏语的历史比较与古汉语的借词。比如古藏文塞音韵尾转写读浊音、藏语不自主虚词根据韵尾的清浊分类，中国古代北边语言与早期梵汉对译中的/-l(-r)/尾来自/-d/尾，日本的上古汉语借词有浊塞尾，现代汉语方言存在浊塞尾。此外，藏语日喀则、巴尔提、拉郊等方言,《西番译语》以及羌语中的塞韵尾都有爆破性质。汉语的中折调就是爆破的喉塞韵尾。