A Study On Dunhang Phonology In Tang Dynasty And Five Dynasty Period

The research on middle age Chinese phonology has achieved great success. The research on Qieyun is the representative. Through it we basically know the consonant, vowel and tone system of middle age Chinese. However Qieyun is an integrated dialect book, none of a dialect corresponds with it completely. There were many dialect books such as Yunji, Yunlve and so on, but all of them were lost. Dunhuang documents are new materials which make the research possible.Since last century Dunhuang documents' research is very hot, because the material records the social culture phenomena of Tang Five dynasties time and provides rich information. Compared with other vowel books, Dunhuang documents have many advantages: the time and district are certain, the language can reflect the change of phonology at that time, and the material is reliable. So regard the Dunhuang documents as study objects can make up the system of Dunhuang phonology. The study methods contain comparison and statistics.This thesis is composed of six sections.Section one: Preface. It explains the value of research, predecessors' research results, material and methods, and the phonetic symbols.Section two: Consonant. Summarize the consonant system of Dunhuang phonology in Tang Five dynasties time by using the comparison between Tibetan and Chinese pronunciation, Bianwentongjia characters and Yuanwentongjia characters. At the same time, discuss the questions relative to the system. According to the material, great changes have taken place in the consonant system. For example, [f] group separated, Zhi group, Zhang group and a part of Zhuang group integrated. By comprising Tibetan and Chinese, we can conclude that "娘"consonant and "泥"consonant are different. In addition, "日"consonant has two features.Section three: Vowel. There are 39 vowel sections, which are different from predecessors' research. This is because people have different views to the material. In this section, some outstanding phonetic phenomena are analyzed. In Dunhuang documents, a part of nasal terminal vowels disappeared, and this phenomenon has a connection with the features of terminal vowels. Other questions like the features of entering tone terminal vowels, [j] head vowel and whether the fourth grade vowels have head vowels are discussed in this section.Section four: Tone. Here mainly talk about tone's length, height and the evolution of entering tone characters. According to the Dunhuang documents, we can conclude that level tone is the longest, rising tone is longer, falling tone is short and entering tone is the shortest. Furthermore, level tone and entering tone are lower. In the research of Chinese phonology, the evolution of entering tone characters is an important question, but there is no an answer to it till now because of the shortage of material. With the help of Dunhuang documents, we can find the trace of entering tone characters' disappearance. In the course of missing terminal vowels, frequency and position play an important part. In addition, the disappearance of entering tone characters also has a connection with the stress structure.Section five: Tone sandhi. In this section, we summarize some special tone sandhis phenomena in Dunhuang documents, such as assimilation, disassimilation, jianyin, zengyin and the neutral tone, and find the source of neutral tone by describing the phonology of that time.Section six: Conclusion. Summarize all the questions mentioned in this thesis.Dunhuang documents are rich and this thesis only select one part of them to research. Hope this thesis can offer contemporary material to the research on the history of Chinese language.