The History Of The Southern Hunan Dialect Voice Level

Since Zhao Yuanren, Ding Shengshu and so on discovered that the people in south Hunan's partial counties communicated no only in general Mandarin, but also in the local dialects, the research on the local dialects in South Hunan Province has obtained the recognition by dialect academia day by day,and the discussion of the local dialects'nature has been on the rise. The speed of pronunciation evolution is not the same and has its own imbalance development, which is influenced by geographical and social environment simultaneously. This can leaves behind the mark in a specific language or a dialect's phonetic change course and forms the main stratum, the borrowed stratum,the rudimental stratum and so on different historical strata. This dissertation attempts to differentiate the literary and colloquial readings and divide them into different strata according to time sequence and then explain its different origins.The dissertation is composed by the following nine parts. In the exordium, we briefly introduce the distributing areas and the research actuality of the local dialects in South Hunan Province and the research significance, main research methods of the dissertation and the sources of the dialectal data. The main text is divided into eight chapters: in the first chapter, we introduce phonetic system of various representative points in the local dialects in South Hunan Province; in the second chapter, we discuss the structure and the development of the ancient voiced syllable initials in the local dialects in South Hunan Province; in the third chapter we analyze the development type of the apico-dental and lamino-alveolar syllable initials; in the fourth chapter, we analyze the nature of the special initials in the local dialects in South Hunan Province; from the fifth chapter to the seventh chapter, we focus the discussion on the rhyme classes of"Guo" "Jia""Yu""Xie""Xiao""Liu""Xian"and"Shan", both the historical strata and their phonetic evolvement. In the eighth chapter, we make a summary to the research of this dissertation and analyze the external factors and intrinsic factors of formation of the complex pronunciation appearances in the local dialects in South Hunan Province. In the dissertation we consider that under the current condition, we should process the local dialects in South Hunan Province as one mixing property dialect.