Unlocking Ancient Chinese: 19th-Century Scholar Chen Li's Quest to Reconstruct Lost Pronunciations

Chinese pronunciation poses a challenge, even for linguists. Joshua Rudder, on his YouTube channel NativeLang, acknowledges his struggles. He delves into the history of Chinese linguistics, highlighting the work of 19th-century scholar Chen Li, who aimed to recover lost Chinese pronunciations. Chen Li sought to "recover the sounds immortalized in classical texts" without recordings or phonetic transcriptions, relying solely on characters. Chen Li's research led him to the Qieyun, a 1200-year-old dictionary of fanqie (反切), which describes the pronunciation of characters using combinations of others. He consulted the Qieyun and other sources, discovering that the Chinese language had 41 initial consonant sounds, overturning the established belief of 36. However, the precise nature of these sounds remained unclear until the work of Swedish scholar Bernard Karlgren in the 1900s. Other Asian languages with Chinese-derived vocabulary also provide clues. For example, the word for "country" is guó (國) in Mandarin, kuk in Korean (국), koku in Japanese (国), and kuək in Vietnamese (quốc), suggesting a common ancient Chinese ancestor word ending in a K-like consonant sound. This research has revealed a linguistic period of "middle Chinese," hinting at "an even older language to uncover, a thousand years older still."