It’s a known fact that modern Chinese languages/dialects do not have initial consonant clusters like those in English or many other languages. An initial consonant cluster is like the pl- in play, gl- in glass and even str- in strong. So were there consonant clusters like those in Chinese in the past? Most scholars on Chinese phonology agree that there were initial consonant clusters like cl-/gl– and pl-/bl– in Old Chinese.
The different stages of Chinese are generally divided into three stages, Old Chinese, Middle Chinese and Modern Chinese. Old Chinese (also called Archaic Chinese) is basically the period ending in the Han Dynasty, Middle Chinese is after the Han Dynasty to the Song Dynasty and after that is Modern Chinese.
I first came to know this around the time I graduated from junior high school. During that summer vacation I found one of my dad’s books called 語言學論叢 (A Collection of Essays on Linguistics) by Dr. Lin Yutang. He raised many instances of Chinese words with the same phonetic component to propose the likelihood of initial consonant clusters in Old Chinese. The following lists a simple example, not exactly from his book.
- 格
- 客
- 洛
- 路
The first two start with /k/ or /kh/ and the last two start with /l/. (Note: I use / / instead of [ ] as it is easier to type.) Instances like these abound in Chinese and the initial cluster of /kl/ should make it good to explain why as one of the sounds got lost in sound changes. This is based on the fact that no instances of sound changes from /k/ or /g/ to /l/ were known then. I also subscribed to this theory. Later I found that many words that start with the sound of /l/ in Southern Min have variant forms that start with /dz/ or /dʑ/. This sound is usually Romanized as j. I also found the the j sound no longer exists in Xiamen City, China as it has changed to the l sound. This fact can be witnessed from POJ transcriptions in the 19th century as well as dictionaries published in late 19th century by foreign missionaries. In English we know examples of sound changes from /g/ to /dʒ/. /dz/ or /dʑ/ is quite similar to /dʒ/ and we can safely say that the Southern Min j sound is just an example of palatalized g sound. The above can serve as a possible path of sound changes from *g > j > l and this should make the reconstruction of /kl/ not really valid.
More to come in later parts.
