Qī Lín Bāyīn sometimes translated as Book of Eight Sounds or Book of Eight Tones in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, is a Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

 rime book of approximately ten thousand characters

Chinese character

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...

 based on the earlier form of the Fuzhou dialect

Fuzhou dialect

Fuzhou dialect , also known as Foochow dialect, Foochow, Foochowese, Fuzhounese, or Fuzhouhua, is considered the standard dialect of Min Dong, which is a branch of Min Chinese mainly spoken in the eastern part of Fujian Province. Native speakers also call it ' , meaning the language spoken in...

. First compiled in the 17th century, it is the pioneering work of all written sources for Min languages, and is widely quoted in modern academic research in Chinese phonology

Historical Chinese phonology

Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European...

.

Qī Lín Bāyīn is in fact a combination of two dictionaries Qī (戚參將八音字義便覽, The Eight Sounds of General Qi and a Convenient Prospectus of Word Meaning) and Lín (太史林碧山先生珠玉同聲, The Homonyms of Pearl and Jade by the Honorable Lin Bishan). The compilation date of the former antecedes that of the latter.

Authorship

The two surnames

Chinese surname

Chinese family names have been historically used by Han Chinese and Sinicized Chinese ethnic groups in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and among overseas Chinese communities. In ancient times two types of surnames, family names and clan names , existed.The colloquial expressions laobaixing...

 Qī and Lín appearing on the title stand for Qi Jiguang

Qi Jiguang

Qi Jiguang was a Chinese military general and national hero during the Ming Dynasty. He was best remembered for his courage and leadership in the fight against Japanese pirates along the east coast of China, as well as his reinforcement work on the Great Wall of China.-Early life:Qi Jiguang was...

 (戚繼光) and Lin Bishan (林碧山), which might mislead people into thinking that they were the authors of this book. Since the famous military general Qi Jiguang was a native of Shandong Province and no records show he had mastered Fuzhou dialect within the short period of his stay in Fuzhou

Fuzhou

Fuzhou is the capital and one of the largest cities in Fujian Province, People's Republic of China. Along with the many counties of Ningde, those of Fuzhou are considered to constitute the Mindong linguistic and cultural area....

, the likelihood of his being one of the authors have been ruled out without doubt. In recent years, the authenticity of Lin Bishan being the other author has also been put into dispute. So far, the true authorship of Qī Lín Bāyīn still remains unknown.

Tones

The tonal

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

 categories of Fuzhou dialect have remained stable since the time of Qī Lín Bāyīn. In the book title, Bāyīn (lit. eight sounds) denotes eight tones, whose names are: (1) 上平, (2) 上上, (3) 上去, (4) 上入, (5) 下平, (6) 下上, (7) 下去, and (8) 下入. But the sixth tone 下上 is actually identical with the second one 上上 and therefore exists in theory only. In other words, Fuzhou dialect has seven rather than eight tones, and the term Bāyīn is something of a misnomer

Misnomer

A misnomer is a term which suggests an interpretation that is known to be untrue. Such incorrect terms sometimes derive their names because of the form, action, or origin of the subject becoming named popularly or widely referenced—long before their true natures were known.- Sources of misnomers...

.

However, due to the lack of phonetic descriptions of the seven tones, the deduction of the tonal values of that time is considered beyond possibility.

Initials

In Qī Lín Bāyīn, the fifteen initials are organized into a five-character shī

Shi (poetry)

Shi is the Chinese word for "poetry" or "poem", anciently associated with Chinese poetry. In modern times, shi can and has been used as an umbrella term to mean poetry in any form or language, whether or not Chinese; but, it may imply or be used to refer certain classical forms of poetry, for...

 (the last five characters "打掌與君知" are simply used to make up the four lines as a whole), as follows:

柳邊求氣低, [l], [p], [k], [kʰ], [t]

波他曾日時, [pʰ], [tʰ], [ts], [n], [s]

鶯蒙語出非, null initial, [m], [ŋ], [tsʰ], [h]

打掌與君知.

In spite of the perceptible confluence of [n] and [l] in modern Fuzhou dialect, the initial structure nowadays is by and large the same as it was in the time of Qī Lín Bāyīn.

Rimes

Likewise, a cí

Ci (poetry)

Ci is a kind of lyric Classical Chinese poetry using a poetic meter based upon certain patterns of fixed-rhythm formal types. For speakers of English, the word "ci" is pronounced somewhat like "tsuh"...

 is built up in Qī Lín Bāyīn by all thirty-three rimes

Syllable rime

In the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. It is the part of the syllable used in poetic rhyme, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech.The rime is usually the...

 in the then Fuzhou dialect (three characters, "金", "梅" and "遮", are redundant), as follows:

春花香, [uŋ/uk], [ua/uaʔ], [ioŋ/iok]

秋山開, [iu], [aŋ/ak], [ai]

嘉賓歡歌須金杯. [a/aʔ], [iŋ/ik], [uaŋ/uak], [o/oʔ], [y], redundant, [uoi]

孤燈光輝燒銀缸. [u/uʔ], [ɛŋ/ɛk], [uoŋ/uok], [ui], [ieu], [yŋ/yk], [oŋ/ok])

之東郊, [i], [øʔ/øk], [au]

過西橋. [uo/uoʔ], [ɛ/ɛʔ], [io/ioʔ]

雞聲催初天, [ie], [iaŋ/iak], [øy], [œ/œʔ], [ieŋ/ieʔ]

奇梅歪遮溝. [ia/iaʔ], redundant, [uai], redundant, [ɛu]

The past couple of centuries witnessed three major changes in Fuzhou dialect. The first is the phenomenon of close/open rimes, by which the 上去, 上入 and 下去 characters shift its rime to its open form under certain circumstances; the second is the merger of [iu] and [ieu], as well as [ui] and [uoi]; and the last is the confusion of the codas [-k] and [-ʔ].

Role in early studies of Fuzhou dialect

For centuries, Qī Lín Bāyīn had been utilized by local people as an authoritative reference book of the Foochow pronunciation. Furthermore, it also greatly assisted the earliest Western missionaries in Fuzhou in learning and studying the native language.

M. C. White, a Methodist from the United States, is the first missionary that attempted to romanize

Romanization

In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...

 Qī Lín Bāyīn, as he specifically pointed out in his work: "... the system of initials and finals used in the 'Book of Eight Tones,' ... would form a complete alphabet for the Fuh Chau dialect. They have been so used by missionaries for writing colloquial phrases, in their private study of the language. Three of the gospels have been written out in this manner by Chinese teachers in the employment of missionaries." M.C. White made a careful analysis of all phonemes and romanized them by using the System of Sir William Jones. The scheme consists of fourteen consonants (null initial excluded) and nine vowels:

1. Consonants

   ch, ch', h, k, k', l, m, n, ng, p, p', s, t, t'

2. Vowels

   a, e, è, ë, i, o, ò, u, ü

William Jones Phonetic Alphabet had varied over time, and became standardized as Foochow Romanized (Bàng-uâ-cê

Bàng-uâ-cê

Foochow Romanized, a.k.a. Bàng-uâ-cê or Hók-ciŭ-uâ Lò̤-mā-cê , is a romanized orthography for the Fuzhou dialect adopted in the middle of 19th century by Western missionaries. It had varied at different times, and became standardized in the 1890s...

) several decades later.

See also

• Fuzhou dialect
  Fuzhou dialect
  Fuzhou dialect , also known as Foochow dialect, Foochow, Foochowese, Fuzhounese, or Fuzhouhua, is considered the standard dialect of Min Dong, which is a branch of Min Chinese mainly spoken in the eastern part of Fujian Province. Native speakers also call it ' , meaning the language spoken in...
  
  
• Foochow Romanized