MING DYNASTY MOUNTAIN SONGS'
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the rhyming characters for the Feng Meng-lung collection and have made a preliminary analysis of the patterns. The rhyme scheme generally conforms with what we might anticipate on the basis of our knowledge of modern Wu dialects. (Note here that these Mountain Songs come from Wu District, a small area near Soo-chow; the term 'Wu dialects' refers to a large family of dialects spoken in a broad region around the Yangtze River delta.) The full details of the Mountain Songs' rhyme patterns will take considerably more study but briefly we have a system in which the ancient nasal finals have merged. This merger seems to have produced a distinct final, probably a nasalized vowel, after some vowel nuclei; after other vowels the nasalization has disappeared completely producing rhymes with syllables which never had nasal finals. There are very few ancient entering tone characters in rhyming position but these few rhyme freely with characters from other tone categories. When compared with such evidence as Yuen-ren Chao's Studies in the Modern Wu Dialects the Mountain Songs stand clearly in the Wu family but, not unexpectedly, they do not correspond precisely to any single dialect recorded by Chao.
There is little doubt that we could make a reliable reconstruction of the syllable finals, i.e. the rhyming part of the syllable, for Ming Dynasty Wu District dialect. However, we now run into a major problem and one which serves well to point up the value of having both textual and linguistic reconstructions when working out proto-forms. Although the syllable finals could be reconstructed from the poems, there is no reliable way to derive the syllable initial consonants merely from the evidence of the poetry. Scholars working with rhyming dictionaries do not have this problem since their texts generally set up charts distinguishing characters by initial as well as final. In the Mountain Songs, and presumably in other poetry of this type, we do not even have negative evidence for distinguishing the initials of the rhyming characters. Thus, since we do have many examples of characters rhyming with themselves, it is not safe to say that homophones of other types do not rhyme. It is therefore fruitless to attempt any separation into syllable initial categories on the premise that the rhyming characters will not have identical initial consonants.
The solution of the syllable initial problem should then be sought in the evidence afforded by a linguistic reconstruction of
MING DYNASTY MOUNTAIN SONGS'
107
the rhyming characters for the Feng Meng-lung collection and have made a preliminary analysis of the patterns. The rhyme scheme generally conforms with what we might anticipate on the basis of our knowledge of modern Wu dialects. (Note here that these Mountain Songs come from Wu District, a small area near Soo- chow; the term 'Wu dialects' refers to a large family of dialects spoken in a broad region around the Yangtze River delta.) The full details of the Mountain Songs' rhyme patterns will take con- siderably more study but briefly we have a system in which the ancient nasal finals have merged. This merger seems to have produced a distinct final, probably a nasalized vowel, after some vowel nuclei; after other vowels the nasalization has disappeared completely producing rhymes with syllables which never had nasal finals. There are very few ancient entering tone characters in rhyming position but these few rhyme freely with characters from other tone categories. When compared with such evidence as Yuen-ren Chao's Studies in the Modern Wu Dialects the Moun- tain Songs stand clearly in the Wu family but, not unexpectedly, they do not correspond precisely to any single dialect recorded by Chao.
There is little doubt that we could make a reliable reconstruc- tion of the syllable finals, i.e. the rhyming part of the syllable, for Ming Dynasty Wu District dialect. However, we now run into a major problem and one which serves well to point up the value of having both textual and linguistic reconstructions when work- ing out proto-forms. Although the syllable finals could be recon- structed from the poems, there is no reliable way to derive the syllable initial consonants merely from the evidence of the poetry. Scholars working with rhyming dictionaries do not have this pro- blem since their texts generally set up charts distinguishing charac- ters by initial as well as final. In the Mountain Songs, and pre- sumably in other poetry of this type, we do not even have negative evidence for distinguishing the initials of the rhyming characters. Thus, since we do have many examples of characters rhyming with themselves, it is not safe to say that homophones of other types do not rhyme. It is therefore fruitless to attempt any separation into syllable initial categories on the premise that the rhyming characters will not have identical initial consonants.
The solution of the syllable initial problem should then be sought in the evidence afforded by a linguistic reconstruction of
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