Court Dialect

Mandarin ( zh, t=, s=官话, p=Guānhuà, l=official speech, first=t) was the common spoken language of administration of the Chinese empire during the Ming and Qing dynasties. It arose as a practical measure, due to the mutual unintelligibility of the varieties 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. The language was a koiné based on Mandarin dialects. The southern variant spoken around Nanjing was prevalent in the late Ming and early Qing eras, but a form based on the Beijing dialect became dominant by the mid-19th century and developed into Standard Chinese in the 20th century. In some 19th-century works, it was called the court dialect.

History

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 a koiné based on various northern dialects. Until well into the 19th century, this language was based on dialects spoken in the area of Nanjing, the first Ming capital and a major cultural centre, though not identical to any single dialect. The standard language of the Ming and early Qing, when it was based on lower Yangtze dialects, is sometimes called Middle Mandarin.

In 1375, the Hongwu Emperor commissioned a dictionary known as the () intended to give a standard pronunciation. The dictionary was unsuccessful, criticised on one side for departing from the tradition of the Song dynasty rime dictionaries and rime tables, and on the other for not accurately reflecting the contemporary standard of elegant speech.

The Korean scholar Shin Suk-ju published the ( "Correct Rhymes from the Hongwu Reign with Korean Translation and Commentaries") in 1455, augmenting the by giving the Chinese pronunciation of each word using the newly created Hangul 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 of Choe Sejin.
Kim Kwangjo, in his extensive study of these materials, concluded that Shin's standard readings constitute an idealized phonology of the earlier dictionary, while the popular readings reflect contemporary speech. In contrast, Yùchí Zhìpíng and Weldon South Coblin hold that the two readings reflect different versions of 15th-century standard speech.

The term ( zh, t=官話, s=官话, first=t, labels=no), or "language of the officials", first appeared in Chinese sources in the mid-16th century.
Later in that century, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci used the term in his diary:

The missionaries recognized the utility of this standard language, and embarked on its study. They translated the term into European languages as (Portuguese) and (Spanish), meaning the language of the mandarins, or imperial officials. Ricci and Michele Ruggieri published a Portuguese-Mandarin dictionary in the 1580s. Nicolas Trigault's guide to Mandarin pronunciation was published in 1626. Grammars of Mandarin were produced by Francisco Varo (finished in 1672 but not printed until 1703) and Joseph Prémare (1730).

In 1728, the Yongzheng Emperor, unable to understand the accents of officials from Guangdong and Fujian, issued a decree requiring the governors of those provinces to provide for the teaching of proper pronunciation. Although the resulting Academies for Correct Pronunciation (, ) were short-lived, the decree did spawn a number of textbooks that give some insight into the ideal pronunciation.

Although Beijing 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. 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. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. The new standard was described in grammars produced by Joseph Edkins (1864), Thomas Wade (1867) and Herbert Giles (1873).

In the early 20th century, reformers decided that China needed a national language. The traditional written form, Literary Chinese, was replaced with written vernacular Chinese, which drew its vocabulary and grammar from a range of Northern 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-based , which was adapted and developed into modern Standard Chinese, which is also often called Mandarin.

Phonology

The initials of Shin Suk-ju's standard readings (mid-15th century) differed from those of Late Middle Chinese only in the merger of two series of retroflexes:

Sin's system had fewer finals than Late Middle Chinese.
In particular, final stops ''-p'', ''-t'' and ''-k'' had all merged as a final glottal stop, as found in modern Jiang-Huai Mandarin:

The system had the mid vowels and , which have merged with the open vowel in the modern standard language. For example, and are both ''guān'' in the modern language but were distinguished as and in Sin's system.
The Middle Chinese level tone had split into two registers conditioned by voicing of the initial, as in modern Mandarin dialects.

In comparison with Shin'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 finals with . The initials and had become voiced fricatives and respectively. had merged into before mid and low vowels, and both initials had disappeared before high vowels. By the early 18th century, the mid-vowel / had merged with .
However unlike the contemporary Beijing pronunciation, in the early 19th century, Mandarin still distinguished between palatalized velars and dental affricates, the source of the spellings "Peking" and "Tientsin" for what are now "Beijing" and "Tianjin."

Vocabulary

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 as 'to drink', 'very', 'all, whatsoever' and 'we (inclusive)'.
In other cases a northern form of a word displaced a southern form in the second half of 19th century, as in ''dōu'' 'all' (formerly ) and 'still, yet' (formerly ).

References

Works cited

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Further reading

Modern studies

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Early European dictionaries and grammars

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External links

''Hóngwǔ Zhèngyùn'' (洪武正韻)
at the Internet Archive.

보물 홍무정운역훈 권3~16 (洪武正韻譯訓 卷三 – 국가문화유산포털 ''Hongmu jeongun yeokhun'' (Correct Rhymes from the Hongwu Reign with Korean Translation and Commentaries), Volumes 3–16

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Mandarin Chinese
Ming dynasty
Culture of the Qing dynasty
History of the Chinese language
Languages attested from the 14th century