The Contrast Between Initial Consonants Of Chinese Pinyin Zh Ch Sh R And The Pronunciation In Japanese

Chinese Phonology studies Chinese phonetics throughout history by analyzing and summarizing phonetic system in different historical periods to explain the historical phonetic phemomena and ancient and mordern phonetic change, and to demonstrate the knowledge of Chinese phonetic development law. Chinese Phonology analyzes Chinese syllables which are composed of three elements, namely, consonant, final and tone. The origin and development of Japanese Wu Phonetics and Han Phonetics have close tie with ancient Chinese phonetics which we can trace back to explore the relationship between them, which both benefit for studying Japanese or ancient Chinese phonetics.It is well known and always emphasized on studying the long relationship between Chinese phomology and Japanese phonology. With help of Chinese-speaking advantage and Chinese pronunciation to memorize Japanese images, forms and meanings in the process of learning Japanese, we find that there are many rules hard to find out the root cause without sysmatically sorting and trimming. However, most of the time, we judge the pronunciation by our mechanical memory or sense, which doubles the work and errors. Many scholars have made a great contribution to the empirical studies concerning their researches on the relations between Japanese phonology and Chinese phonology. However, studies largely focused on sharp contrast to Chinese Pinyin and Chinese pronunciation in Japanese have never appeared until Cheng Chunyou, compared with other scholars sporadically researching and solely discussing in their papers, has sysmatically studied and written on the relations between Japanese vowels and Chinese. Therefore, this paper is to make deep exploration on the link compared consonants of Chinese Pinyin with Chiinese pronunciation in Japanese. Consonants can be described as the first letter of pronunciation. Mastering the link rules will help us quickly determine the correct lines of Japanese pronunciation troubled us usually, work out the mixture of voice and unvoiced and moreover, benefif for the progress of ancient Chinese study. Because of space limitations, this paper is only to try to study the contrast between initial consonants of Chinese Pinyin zh, ch, sh, r and Chinese pronunciation in Japanese, try to find the rules from investigating the develoment of Japanese and ancient Chinese phonetics. These consonants, a larger propotion in Chinese Pinyin, are more complex in evolution. Today, there are still various dialects with ancient sound from which we can vaguely find the traces of its development and close link corresponded to the modern Japanese word sound.This paper lies two methods, synchronic and diachronic comparison, to study the twolanguages. The prologue introduces the status and results of prior studies, and thescope,content and methods in this paper. Chapter1to Chapter5separately research in respect of Chinese Pinyin zh, ch, sh, r, and Japanese, respectively elaborating the development and evolution of both language consonants, trying to unveil the reasons of its link and evolution. The final chapter is a summary of the whole paper, playing sigificant role in the future issues and research.