The Sound System Of Dunhuang Bianwen

Dunhuang Bianwen is one of the representive corpora in the study of Modern Chinese, because it was roughly written in that time's spoken language. It has preserved a large number of misused characters and variant writings. These are very valuable to phonetics. Much research has been done in this field, but there is not a paper to expound the sound system of Dunhuang Bianwen in an overall way.On the basis of summaring the research about Dunhuang Bianwen's misused characters, variant writings and rhyme categories, and of utilizing the research about other Dunhuang literature, this thesis expounds the sound system of Dunhuang Bianwen at the aspects of initials, rhyme categories, tones, and discusses the features and properties about the sound system of Dunhuang Bianwen in my power.The study shows that the sound system of Dunhuang Bianwen has already been different from the sound system of Qieyun( 《切韵》 ), such as: labiodentals divided from bilabials, complete voice initials disappeared, rhyme categories simplified, rusheng(入声) codas reduced, zhuoshangbianqu(浊上变去) completed. These mutations have important values in the history of Chinese sounds. Because they provide abundant data for us to know Chinese sounds changes from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese and show clearly the developing course.They indicate that some important Chinese sounds characteristics appeared in Dunhuang Bianwen.They illustrate that the sounds of Dunhuang Bianwen is consistent with later ancient Chinese Northern Guanhua(官话) on the whole, but the developing trends are more obvious and prominent. Moreover, the sounds of Dunhuang Bianwen possess some features of the Northwestern dialects of the Late Tang and Five Dynasties, such as: zhishe(止摄) and yushe(遇摄) mingled, gengshe(梗摄) and qiyun(齐韵) mingled, -m cada changed a littile erly. These features have important values for us to comprehend the Northwestern dialects of the Late Tang and Five Dynasties, and provide some beneficial ways and scientific bases to compile and to proofread Dunhuang literature.