Report On A Survey Of HuaiYuan Dialect In AnHui Province

Huaiyuan County lies in north of Anhui Province. The Dialects in Huaiyuan County has the intermediacy between other Central Mandarin dialects and the Eastern Mandarin dialects. In former studies, people taked the dialect as Eastern Mandarin dialects. This paper is the first one to study Huaiyuan dialect because no man study it specially before. The difference in it, the syllabary and tone sandhi are described minutely after fieldwork. The phenomena of entering tone changing be discussed thoroughly too.The format of the paper consists of four parts: the first aspect is General situation of Huaiyuan county and Huaiyua dialect; the second aspect is Analysis of phonetic system; the third one is Comparison with ancient phonology and the last aspect is Evolution of entering tone.Three standpoints are showed in this paper: At first, the dialect which between Eastern Mandarin dialect and Central Mandarin dialects has the intermediacy. Entering tone has disappeared in northwest of Huaiyuan and the dialect has emerged in Central Mandarin; entering tone still exist in southeast of this county, but it is becoming lax ones now. The second one, characteristics of initial consonants and final vowels in Huaiyuan Dialect are :ancient initial consonants " 知,庄,章" are read as [ts tsh s ] and ancient final vowel "深, 臻,曾,梗,通 "are read as front nasal. Huaiyuan Dialect has entering tone which end with a glottal stop [?]. In tone sandhi, positive-entering tone and negative-entering tone can be seen in HuaiYuan dialect Neutral tone also can change. The third one is: Mandarin dialects encroaching is main reason why entering tone disappear in HuaiYuan dialect. The vanishing track of entering tone is: positive-entering tone and negative-entering tone merge in one which end with a glottal stop [?], then go to lax.