| Mandarin | |
|---|---|
| Middle Mandarin | |
| 官話Guānhuà | |
 Frontispiece of Fourmont's Chinese grammar (1742):Chũm Kuĕ Kuõn Hoá (中國官話), orMedii Regni Communis Loquela ('Middle Kingdom's Common Speech')[1] | |
| Region | China |
| Era | Ming andQing dynasties |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
Mandarin (traditional Chinese:官話;simplified Chinese:官话;pinyin:Guānhuà;lit. 'official speech') was the common spoken language of administration of the Chinese empire during theMing andQing dynasties. It arose as a practical measure, due to themutual unintelligibility of thevarieties of Chinese spoken in different parts of China. Knowledge of this language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined.[2][3] The language was akoiné based onMandarin dialects. The southern variant spoken aroundNanjing was prevalent in the late Ming and early Qing eras, but a form based on theBeijing dialect became dominant by the mid-19th century and developed intoStandard Chinese in the 20th century.[4] In some 19th-century works, it was called thecourt dialect.
By the late imperial period, local varieties of Chinese had diverged to the extent that people from different provinces could not understand one another. In order to facilitate communication between officials from different provinces, and between officials and the inhabitants of the areas to which they were posted, imperial administrations adopted akoiné based on various northern dialects. Until well into the 19th century, this language was based on dialects spoken in the area ofNanjing, the first Ming capital and a major cultural centre, though not identical to any single dialect.[5] The standard language of the Ming and early Qing, when it was based on lower Yangtze dialects, is sometimes calledMiddle Mandarin.[6]
In 1375, theHongwu Emperor commissioned a dictionary known as theHóngwǔ Zhèngyùn (洪武正韻) intended to give a standard pronunciation. The dictionary was unsuccessful, criticised on one side for departing from the tradition of theSong dynastyrime dictionaries andrime tables, and on the other for not accurately reflecting the contemporary standard of elegant speech.[7]
The Korean scholarSin Sukchu published theHongmu Jeong'un Yeokhun (洪武正韻譯訓 "Correct Rhymes from the Hongwu Reign with Korean Translation and Commentaries") in 1455, augmenting theZhèngyùn by giving the Chinese pronunciation of each word using the newly createdHangul alphabet. In addition to these "standard readings", he recorded a rather different body of "popular readings", some of which are also preserved in the works ofCh'oe Sejin.Kim Kwangjo, in his extensive study of these materials, concluded that Sin's standard readings constitute an idealized phonology of the earlier dictionary, while the popular readings reflect contemporary speech. In contrast, Yùchí Zhìpíng andWeldon South Coblin hold that the two readings reflect different versions of 15th-century standard speech.[8]
The termGuānhuà (官話;官话), or "language of the officials", first appeared in Chinese sources in the mid-16th century.[9]Later in that century, theJesuit missionaryMatteo Ricci used the term in his diary:[10]
Besides the various dialects of the different provinces, the province vernacular so to speak, there is also a spoken language common to the whole Empire, known as theQuonhoa, an official language for civil and forensic use. [...] TheQuonhoa dialect is now in vogue among the cultured classes, and is used between strangers and the inhabitants of the province they may visit.
The missionaries recognized the utility of this standard language, and embarked on its study.[11] They translated the termGuānhuà into European languages aslíngua mandarim (Portuguese) andla lengua mandarina (Spanish), meaning the language of themandarins, or imperial officials.[12] Ricci andMichele Ruggieri published a Portuguese-Mandarin dictionary in the 1580s.Nicolas Trigault's guide to Mandarin pronunciation was published in 1626.[13] Grammars of Mandarin were produced byFrancisco Varo (finished in 1672 but not printed until 1703) andJoseph Prémare (1730).[14]
In 1728, theYongzheng Emperor, unable to understand the accents of officials fromGuangdong andFujian, issued a decree requiring the governors of those provinces to provide for the teaching of proper pronunciation. Although the resulting Academies for Correct Pronunciation (正音書院,Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) were short-lived, the decree did spawn a number of textbooks that give some insight into the ideal pronunciation.[15]
AlthoughBeijing had become the capital in 1420, its speech did not rival the prestige of the Nanjing-based standard until the middle of the Qing dynasty.[16] As late as 1815,Robert Morrison based the first English–Chinese dictionary on the lower Yangtze koiné as the standard of the time, though he conceded that the Beijing dialect was gaining in influence.[17] By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.[4] The new standard was described in grammars produced byJoseph Edkins (1864),Thomas Wade (1867) andHerbert Giles (1873).[18]
In the early 20th century, reformers decided that China needed a national language. The traditional written form,Literary Chinese, was replaced withwritten vernacular Chinese, which drew its vocabulary and grammar from a range ofNorthern dialects (now known as Mandarin dialects). After unsuccessful attempts to define a cross-dialectal spoken standard, it was realized that a single spoken form must be selected. The only realistic candidate was the Beijing-basedguānhuà, which was adapted and developed into modernStandard Chinese, which is also often called Mandarin.[19]
The initials ofSin Sukchu's standard readings (mid-15th century) differed from those ofLate Middle Chinese only in the merger of two series of retroflexes:[20]
| Labial | Dental | Sibilant | Retroflex | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop or affricate | voiceless | p | t | ts | tʂ | k | ʔ |
| aspirate | pʰ | tʰ | tsʰ | tʂʰ | kʰ | ||
| voiced | b | d | dz | dʐ | ɡ | ||
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | ||||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | s | ʂ | x | ||
| voiced | v | z | ʐ | ɣ | |||
| Approximant | ʋ | l | r | ∅ | |||
Sin's system had fewer finals than Late Middle Chinese.In particular, final stops-p,-t and-k had all merged as a finalglottal stop, as found in modernJiang-Huai Mandarin:[21]
| əj | əw | əm | ən | əjŋ | əʔ | əjʔ | ||
| z̩,r̩ | r̩ʔ | |||||||
| i | iw | im | in | iŋ | iʔ | |||
| u | uj | un | uŋ | ujŋ | uʔ | ujʔ | ||
| y | yn | yŋ | yjŋ | yʔ | yjʔ | |||
| ɔ | ɔn | ɔʔ | ||||||
| je | jej | jew | jem | jen | jeʔ | |||
| wɔ | wɔn | wɔʔ | ||||||
| ɥe | ɥen | ɥeʔ | ||||||
| a | aj | aw | am | an | aŋ | aʔ | awʔ | |
| ja | jaj | jaw | jam | jan | jaŋ | jaʔ | jawʔ | |
| wa | waj | wan | waŋ | waʔ | wawʔ |
The system had themid vowels[e] and[ɔ], which have merged with theopen vowel[a] in the modern standard language. For example,官 and關 are bothguān in the modern language but were distinguished as[kwɔn] and[kwan] in Sin's system.[22]The Middle Chinese level tone had split into two registers conditioned by voicing of the initial, as in modern Mandarin dialects.[22]
In comparison with Sin's standard readings, the major changes in the late Ming language that were described by European missionaries were the loss of the voiced initials and the merger of[-m] finals with[-n].[23] The initials[ʋ-] and[r-] had become voiced fricatives[v-] and[ʐ-] respectively.[24][ʔ-] had merged into[ŋ-] before mid and low vowels, and both initials had disappeared before high vowels.[25] By the early 18th century, the mid-vowel[e]/[ɔ] had merged with[a].[26]However unlike the contemporary Beijing pronunciation, in the early 19th century, Mandarin still distinguished betweenpalatalized velars and dental affricates, the source of the spellings "Peking" and "Tientsin" for what are now "Beijing" and "Tianjin."[27]
Most of the vocabulary found in descriptions of Mandarin speech before the mid-19th century has been retained by the modern standard language. However several words that appear in the more broadly-based written vernacular of the Qing and earlier periods are absent from early accounts of standard speech.These include such now-common words ashē喝 'to drink',hěn很 'very',suǒyǒude所有的 'all, whatsoever' andzánmen咱們 'we (inclusive)'.[28]In other cases a northern form of a word displaced a southern form in the second half of 19th century, as indōu都 'all' (formerlydū) andhái還 'still, yet' (formerlyhuán).[29]
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