{"id":1314,"date":"2008-10-21T19:22:22","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T11:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/?p=1314"},"modified":"2008-10-21T17:26:14","modified_gmt":"2008-10-21T09:26:14","slug":"all-325-words-that-form-the-chinese-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2008\/all-325-words-that-form-the-chinese-language\/","title":{"rendered":"all 325 ‘words that form the Chinese language’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>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.<\/em>. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Here’s one column: <\/p>\n

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<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> 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? <\/p>\n

sources: <\/p>\n