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Middle Chinese and Old Chinese recitations

admin — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:09:38 +0000

There have long been Middle Chinese and Old Chinese reconstructions on paper, but since the Chinese script is not phonetic (although syllabic to a degree), it has been difficult to ascertain pronunciations. If one takes Classical Latin as an example — that is a reconstruction of fairly normal and believable speech of about 2000 years ago if read aloud, yet there is nothing approaching that for Middle Chinese (about >1000 years ago) much less for Old Chinese (>2000 years ago). Recently though, a couple of funny videos cropped up on Youtube showing people making overly academic attempts at reading classical texts using reconstructed archaic pronunications.

Here’s a guy attempting to read Tang Dynasty poetry in Middle Chinese.

Here’s another guy attempting to read some of the oldest written poetry from the Zhou era in Old Chinese.

Generally I find these unbelievable and unnatural, probaby due to a combination of reconstruction error and bad or exaggerated intonation. Nobody can speak like this. For Middle Chinese it has been argued that the rhyme book scheme does not give one speech pattern and in any case the reconstruction has severe survivor bias toward modern southern dialects. For Old Chinese, I’m just speechless… I don’t think this guy even knows how to read Zheng Zhang Shang Fang’s phonetic notation, so he produces hilariously impractical initial and ending clusters with bizarre tonal variations to boot. Anyway, it’s a start.

Here’s an interesting article on the origins of court dialects.

almost dead?

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 02:08:31 +0000

I came across a story today of somebody who avoided a head on collision by moving to the next lane at the last moment, almost by involuntary reaction and without realizing what was going on. The full gravity of the situation always dawns on the survivor slowly, because everything happens so quickly.

This reminds me of my own near death experience. It was in the Bay Area near an airport in the middle of the night, I can’t remember where now. There was a very confusing road division where there were two left turn lanes, and one of them is somehow on top of some kind of surface rail (trolley) track running parallel to the lanes. I couldn’t see clearly at all. The traffic lights were not normal traffic lights, but some kind of symbol for each lane. Anyway, there were no dividers, fences, or barriers of any kind and I somehow ended up half on the tracks waiting for the light to turn green. Then in my rear view mirror, I see the bright lights of a train coming straight behind me. As the train comes ever closer, I get a feeling just like in a dream when something unreal is happening, a feeling of … “wait, this doesn’t make any sense”. So just like you might violently snap out of a dream in cold sweat, I stepped on the gas, ran the red, and moved into the next lane on autopilot, as the train whizzes by not more than a few feet beside me.

No horns, no noise, just a quiet train in the middle of the night. The whole thing still feels like sleepwalking to me and still doesn’t make any sense, but that would have been a terrible way to die.