The New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery offers a glimpse inside a book published in the 1770s: The Chinese traveller. Containing a geographical, commercial, and political history of China..
The book provides a chart of 325 syllables identified as being “A LIST of all the WORDS that form the CHINESE LANGUAGE.” I’ll skip the obvious and not address why that’s ridiculous.
The chart is apparently in the first volume of the work. But since the NYPL doesn’t provide many images and Google Books provides only the second volume (scanned from the one in the NYPL collection), I wasn’t able to find any explanatory text about the chart or the authors’ views of Sinitic languages.
Here’s one column:
mouen, moui, moum, mouon, na, nai, nam, nan, nao, nem, ngai, ngan, ngao, ngue, nguen, ngeo, ngo, ni, niam, niau, niao, nie, nien, nieou, nio
Which Sinitic language these are supposed to represent isn’t clear. But, no, it doesn’t appear to be Cantonese, which tends to be the default first guess when it comes to Sinitic languages — at least until recently. My guess is that it’s some form of Mandarin that’s been written in a bastardized way, obscuring differences between what are represented in Pinyin by b and p, d and t, g and k, etc. But then there are those -m finals. What do the rest of y’all think?
sources:
- images from The Chinese traveller, New York Public Library Digital Gallery
- The Chinese traveller. Containing a geographical, commercial, and political history of China, with a particular account of their customs, manners, religion …. To which is prefixed, the life of Confucius … Collected from DuHalde, LeCompte, and other modern travellers, vol. 2, 1772, Google Books
Iinitials Ng, F, and V and final -m could point to Hakka, though you may expect -ng finals too.
I have managed to access the first volume, a reproduction of a copy from Goldsmiths’ Library of the University of London, through Google Books. Here’s a screenshot of a discussion about the present tense (page 259). Just email me if you want any other pages and can’t access them yourself…
I just realised I can download a PDF of the book, so you can grab yourself a copy at https://files.warwick.ac.uk/gfreeman/files/The_Chinese_Traveller.pdf
Definitely some sort of Mandarin, not Hakka. How do they pronounce the final -ng in Xi’an, anyone knows? Both initial v- and ng- is still prevalent there.
The compiler of the list and the author of the chapter on the Chinese language were possibly not the same person.
As to bastardization: The author does mention aspiration, alongside tones, but transliterates neither of them.
could also be that -m should be something more like -ng and that the author has misheard or misrepresented the nasal finals.
It’s definitely a northern dialect, because from the screenshot that GF sent, ‘ta’ is used as the third-person pronoun, which is a feature that developed in the Mandarin dialects. The fact that -p, -t, and -k are not present also points to this conclusion. As for the presence of -m, it is documented that the Proto-Mandarin of the Yuan dynasty had -m before it merged with -n; I have no idea what present day northern dialects have -m though. The absence of -ng is puzzling though.
> The absence of -ng is puzzling though.
I could be a deficiency on the part of the recorder, who heard both -n and -ng as -n?
“I could”? It could. Maybe I should stop acting smart.
Anyway I’ve seen some of the reconstructed phonologies from the past, with suspiciously many vowels, and assumptions that there were many people who all read them the same… OK, quitting while I’m ahead.
Standard mandarin isn’t really widely used in the 1700’s, that is, if it even exists at all. Since I don’t really know how romanization works outside of Hanyu Pinyin, I’ll just provide some youtube video of various mandarin dialects, you’ll judge which one might sound the closest:
Shangdong Dialect, it had huge influence in present day dongbei dialect (which of course spoke Manchu in the 1700’s) And video is olympics parody dub of the movie titanic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjFhdTtD644
Dalian Dialect, which is mush between shangdong and hebei dialects. The video is language conference thing that has a word in standard mandarin follow by the dialect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SURXk2J6fb4
Shichuan Dialect, which is pretty representative of southwestern dialects. The video is a lesson to learn the dialect from Mandarin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtauJBczNwA
Shaanxi (Shanxi) dialect: pretty representative of northwestern mandarin. The video follow the format of a character’s name in standard mandarin? and a typical phase might be uttered by that character in Shaanxi Dialect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njUKb95F_bg
And it’s could also be Wu Dialects too, also I doubt it. Here is Suzhou dialect. The video is a poem recital of ???
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwEx4FEqKQk&
luhai, youtube isn’t the most useful website from China :(