Research On The Phonology Of Wenzhou Dialect At The End Of Qing Dynasty

Romanized Wenzhou dialect 《the New Testament:The Four Gospels and Acts》 is a book of the Bible which was translated by William Edward Soothill who came to Wenzhou and designed a set of Roman Alphabet alphabetic scheme as a leading missionary with some other missionaries and local scholars more than a hundred years ago.The Romanized Wenzhou dialect 《the New Testament:The Four Gospels and Acts》 is a adoption of the Roman Alphabet alphabetic scheme.Because of the field of the Bible that is translated in Wenzhou dialect even the Bible that is translated in Chinese dialects has not be focused on widely by the educational circles,the value they retain the end of 19 centery language phonological reality is ignored by educational circles.This thesis will focus on the text of the Bible that is translated in Wenzhou dialect more than a handred years ago.We attempt to translate it into the interenational phonetic system.This thesis reconstruct the phonology of the Romanized Wenzhou dialect 《the New Testament:The Four Gospels and Acts》 by use of historical comparison,internal reconstruction,induction and statistics,sound examination,external reference and so on.Then we conpare it with a later Wenzhou dialect rhyme book 《Wenzhou Yin Shi Zi Jie Fa》 (1913) at a synchronic level.And we compare it with six dialects of Oujiang dialect which is the sub-dialect of contemporary Wu dialect at a diachronic level.Though the comparison,we attempt to discovery the connections and differences between this Bible that is translated in Romanized Wenzhou dialect and the contemporaneous document and the contemporary dialect material.The conclution hold that the initials and finals vary greatly,but the tones has not changed much.