The Research Of Modern Chinese Phoetics: Based On ToGo Ben'Yo

TOGOBEN'YO is a textbook for learning Chinese written by Mt Okajima in the early 18th century. It's a very important foreign document for the research of modern Chinese language. The following part of this thesis will focus on the phonetic notations by hiragana, then compare them with today's Beijing phonology to see their common places and differences. To have a better view of modern Chinese language, we should pay more attention on the contrastive part between these two languages.Referring to initials, TOGOBEN'YO shows some features as follows:1. Initials of Yun, Yi and Ying had mostly turned into zero-initial at that time.2. Many vibrant consonants had devocalized, except some with Yi initial. Besides, a few Chinese words have two phonetic notations, one by vocal hiragana, the other by voiceless hiragana. Yet we can't judge that the phenomenon is caused whether by printing error or phonetic changing, for the examples were too few.3. There were few initials had palatalized. Most of the initials in Jian group were not turned into modern form [tc], [tph], [c] in Beijing phonology. It's can be confirmed in A Grammar of the Chinese Language which was written a century later.4. Overall, most of the initials in phonetic notation are corresponding with today's Beijing phonology, left alone a few excpets.Referring to vocals, the reason why some notations do not correspond with Beijing phonology is that these vocals have no equivalence in Japanese. It's not the evidence of sound change in Beijing Mandarin. But some phenomenons in notations do reflect the sound of Mandarin in that time, eg. difference between oral and written language, remain of 3rd class medial sound. Besides, the vocals of二,而,兒had not turned into [a], which is different from the record in A Help to Western Scholars.