PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTIONS OF ENTERING-TONE CHARACTERS
This list contains the entering-tone characters used in the recent-style shi poems and in the end rhymes of the ci poems presented in this anthology. All entering-tone characters end with the unaspirated consonant p, t, or k. Prevalent though they were during Tang and Song times, entering tones no longer exist in modern standard Chinese, but they are preserved in many regional Chinese dialects like Cantonese and Hakka.
NOTES
This transcription is based on the Early Middle Chinese system of pronunciation, as given in the Qieyun 切韵 (literally, cutting rhymes), an important Chinese dictionary of 601, arranged according to rhyme, which indicates pronunciations in some detail. The transcription is philologically accurate in that it represents all the distinctions known from the Qièyùn and other Middle Chinese sources. Designed with nonspecialists in mind, it uses only the letters and symbols of the English keyboard. However, there were more sounds in Middle Chinese than we have letters, so some sounds are represented by two, three, or even four letters. Also, Middle Chinese had some sounds that modern English does not, and vice versa (as with any two languages). In order to represent Middle Chinese pronunciation, some arbitrary conventions are necessary. The following are the main ones (described more fully in William H. Baxter, A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology [Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992], 27–85).
—William H. Baxter
1. The clusters ae and ea represent single vowel sounds probably like the a and e in “bat” and “bet,” respectively.
2. The letter o represents a sound probably like the short u in “tug” (not like the usual English o).
3. The letter r after a consonant indicates that it is pronounced with retroflexion—that is, with the tip of the tongue turned back to touch the hard palate. English does not use such sounds, but they are found in many other languages, including modern Mandarin (written zh, ch, and sh in pinyin). In the Middle Chinese transcriptions, the letter h after a consonant indicates that it is aspirated (that is, pronounced with an audible puff of breath after it). So a combination like tsrh-represents a ch-like consonant that is retroflex (as indicated by the -r-) and aspirated (as indicated by the -h-)—more or less like the Mandarin sound written ch in pinyin romanization.
4. The letter x at the beginning of a word represents a sound like the German ch in “Bach.”
5. The apostrophe at the beginning of a word represents a glottal stop, the catch in the throat that some Cockney speakers use instead of t in words like “bottle.” In the phonetic notation used by linguists, it is written as [
]. For most purposes, it can be ignored.
6. The letter y at the beginning of a word represents an ordinary y sound, but the combinations sy and zy represent, respectively, sounds like sh and zh (the sounds between the vowels in “pressure” and “pleasure,” respectively). Similarly, tsy represents a ch sound (without aspiration; if it is aspirated, it is written tsyh [for example, chi 赤 tsyhek]). When a y sound appears after the initial consonant or at the end of the syllable, it is written as j (as is customary in linguistics).