Groups - phonetic map : 屈 qu

note that 屈 has 出 (chū) as phonetic component, see its phonetic map

Hi goulniky,
how many characters have you covered so far in total in your maps?

henning, why don't you take a look at my list of maps?  as of that reply, I have covered 72 phonetic characters, with 627 compounds containing these characters, for a total of 699 characters.

BTW, I recently added a 'scattering coefficient, that :

indicates the predictive power of the phonetic element, where [0] indicates a singlepronunciation. the algorithm takes into account the number of derived pronunciations, and the proximity of both initial and final sounds

This is the product of 2 numbers : one is the distance between the groups of compounds,  based on the numbers in each group (e.g. 14 and 7 for 票, the result is the square root of (14^2+7^2)/21^2 :-)))

the other number is based on the phonetic proximity, corrected for pinyin inconsitencies (where the 'u' in 'qu' is actually a 'ü' and the 'i' in 'zhi' is not the same as the 'i' in 'qi'). the result is the sum of a proximity factor for initial and final sounds.

in the end, this somewhat arbitrary coefficient gives a good indication of how strong a link there is between the compounds of a given phonetic character. 票 only has 'piao' and 'biao', which are quite close, with balanced examples in both groups [result is 0.6].

on the other hand,  出 has 'chu', 'qu', 'zhuo' and 'duo' and unbalanced (more under 'chu') so that is very scattered [result is 9].

The historical change of pronunciations (in Mandarin) of Chinese characters that have the vowel "-ue", such as 倔 (jue2), 觉 (jue2) and 学 (xue2), is rather tricky and complicated.

觉 kok > kok > kio > jue
学 hok > hok > hio > xue
倔 giuot > giuot > giuo (?) > jue

屈 kiuot > kiuot > kiu > qu

Both 倔 and 屈 had the similar sound in ancient times, but their modern sounds are different from each other. "觉" and "学" also experienced a drastic change in sounds in the past one thousand years.

changye, how do we KNOW what the sounds were like in ancient times and indeed how they have changed from one sound to the next over the years until they got to the current sound ? I don't really suppose archeologists have found ancient mp3 players or suchlike, have they? but seriously, how do we know ? particuarly with Chinese characters. Olde English you can actually READ and see for example how similar English was to German in former times. But you can actually read this and deduct how it was pronounced. In Chinese this is not the case. 

Thanks, goulniky.

Regarding your distance metric: I have to admit, I don't quite get it - what kind of distance does the first factor of the number indicate?

Irregardless of that, such a metric could also give some inisight whether the system of traditional characters is indeed significantly more consistent than the simplified one (from a perspective of phonetic value)...

hi henning, the distance metric is an indicator of grouping (and the reverse indicates dispersion), for instance with 4 groups of characters, i.e. 4 different pinyin sounds :

...so,that distance is best understood as dispersion of characters amongst pinyin sounds. But keep in mind that the maps do not include all characters in existence (those that I do not include are infrequent, if used at all nowadays).

Hi sue3,

As you pointed out, reconstructing ancient sounds of Chinese characters is not an easy job for linguists. In general, scholars have reconstructed ancient pronunciations based on the following records and information.

 1.      Ancient rhyme books and rhyme tables, such as 切韵，唐韵，广韵，平水韵，中原音韵，洪武正韵，七音略，韵镜, etc. They show the rough historical change of sounds between the 5/6th century and the 18/19th century.

2.      Dictionaries edited by western missionaries after the 17th century, such as “程氏墨苑” (1605, Matteo Ricci) and “西儒耳目资” (1626, Nicolas Trigault) . They show romanized pronunciations of Chinese characters.

3.      Ancient poems, which give you info about rhyming in ancient times. In particular, “诗经” and “楚辞” are important because you can learn rhyming patterns before the Common Era, when there was no rhyme book.

4.      Chinese dialects, especially southern ones. They usually preserve ancient pronunciations well. And the same goes for (ancient and modern) pronunciations of Chinese characters used in neighboring countries such as Vietnam, Korean and Japan. Texts written in Phags-pa scripts, ancient Mongolian alphabets, are also helpful for reconstructing old sounds of Chinese characters.

5.     Modern linguistic/phonological theories developed in western countries.