Xiang Voice Rhyme Historical Level Research

As one of the ten dialects in China, Xiang Dialect has not been well studied up to the present. Most of the papers or discourses aimed at the description of the phonetic characteristics of the time, lacking the exploration of the deeper phenomenon undetectable. A few of studies took the research of the history of the Xiang Dialect as the aim although, they still hadlimitations------rough and imprecise, and moreover, lacked the analysis of historical strata.For the above reasons, this dissertation tries to have a systematic analysis of the phonetic phenomenon through the view point of language strata.Our research takes the Analysis of Historical Strata as the main method and the theoretical foundation. By use of Tools for Dialectology (TFD) designed by Professor Pan Wuyun, we separate the different phonetic phenomenon which have different origins into disparate strata, and then have historical comparative analysis in each one, arrange them according to the historical evolvement order, and then try to deduce the approximate times in which they formed referring to the historic literatures.Owing to the special historic and geographical backgrounds, the Chinese dialects are really not single systems, but have different strata which have different origins. Xiang Dialect is also such a case. Many of Xiang's immemorial characteristics have disappeared because of the deep and continuous influence from Gan Dialect and Mandarin. The main part of the characteristics can only been ascended to the Mediaeval Times. From the point of the origins,the phonetic phenomenon of Xiang can be divided into two main strata------literary readingsstratum and colloquial readings stratum. The colloquial readings are directly inherited from the old Xiang and the literary ones are borrowed from the Mandarin at different times.The dissertation is composed by the following five parts:In the exordium, we briefly introduce the distributing areas and the history of Xiang, the research actuality, significance, main research methods of the dissertation and the source of the dialectal data.In the second part, we discuss some theoretical questions such as the method in the Analysis of The Historical Strata, the literary and colloquial readings and some sound change principles involved. In the third part, we discuss the structure and the development of the voiced syllable initials and the apico-dental and lamino-alveolar syllable initials, including initial groups of "Jing精", "Zhi知", "Zhuang庄" and "Zhang章".From Chapter four to Chapter nine are the fourth part. In this part, we focus the discussion on the rhyme classes of "Guo果" "Jia假" "Yu遇" "Liu流" "Xiao效" "Xian咸" "Shan山" "Dang宕" "Jiang江" and "Geng梗, both the historical strata and their phonetic evolvement. The last part is a conclusion.