Phonology of Old Chinese

Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese from documentary evidence. Although the writing system does not describe sounds directly, shared phonetic components of the most ancient Chinese characters are believed to link words that were pronounced similarly at that time. The oldest surviving Chinese verse, in the ''Classic of Poetry'' (''Shijing''), shows which words rhymed in that period. Scholars have compared these bodies of contemporary evidence with the much later Middle Chinese reading pronunciations listed in the '' Qieyun'' rime dictionary published in 601 AD, though this falls short of a phonemic analysis. Supplementary evidence has been drawn from cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages and in Min Chinese, which split off before the Middle Chinese period, Chinese transcriptions of foreign names, and early borrowings from and by neighbouring languages such as Hmong–Mien, Tai and Tocharian languages.

Although many details are disputed, most recent reconstructions agree on the basic structure. It is generally agreed that Old Chinese differed from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless sonorants. Most recent reconstructions also posit consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese.

Syllable structure

Although many details are still disputed, recent formulations are in substantial agreement on the core issues.
For example, the Old Chinese initial consonants recognized by Li Fang-Kuei and William Baxter are given below, with Baxter's (mostly tentative) additions given in parentheses:

Most scholars reconstruct clusters of with other consonants, and possibly other clusters as well, but this area remains unsettled.

In recent reconstructions, such as the widely accepted system of , the rest of the Old Chinese syllable consists of
* an optional medial ,
* an optional medial or (in some reconstructions) some other representation of a distinction between "type-A" and "type-B" syllables,
* one of six vowels:

* an optional coda, which could be a glide or , a nasal , or , or a stop , , or ,
* an optional post-coda or .
In such systems, Old Chinese has no tones; the rising and departing tones of Middle Chinese are treated as reflexes of the Old Chinese post-codas.

Initials

The primary sources of evidence for the reconstruction of the Old Chinese initials are medieval rhyme dictionaries and phonetic clues in the Chinese script.

Middle Chinese initials

The reconstruction of Old Chinese often starts from "Early Middle Chinese", the phonological system of the '' Qieyun'', a rhyme dictionary published in 601, with many revisions and expansions over the following centuries.
According to its preface, the ''Qieyun'' did not record a single contemporary dialect, but set out to codify the pronunciations of characters to be used when reading the classics, incorporating distinctions made in different parts of China at the time (a diasystem).
These dictionaries indicated pronunciation using the ''fanqie'' method, dividing a syllable into an initial consonant and the rest, called the final.
Rhyme tables from the Song dynasty contain a sophisticated feature analysis of the ''Qieyun'' initials and finals, though not a full phonemic analysis.
Moreover, they were influenced by the different pronunciations of that later period.
Scholars have attempted to determine the phonetic content of the various distinctions by examining pronunciations in modern varieties and loans in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese (the Sinoxenic materials), but many details regarding the finals are still disputed.

The ''Qieyun'' distinguishes the following initials, each traditionally named with an exemplary word and classified according to the rhyme table analysis:

By studying sound glosses given by Eastern Han authors, the Qing philologist Qian Daxin

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