(Manual on transcription), Moscow: Muravey, 2002, 263 p.
The reviewed monograph by L. R. Kontsevich, a well-known specialist in historical phonetics, phonology, and writing of East Asian languages, 1 is based on a revised and expanded version of the instructions for transmitting Chinese proper names and terms prepared by the author for the USSR Academy of Sciences in the 1980s. The publication of a book on Chinese words in Russian texts at the beginning of the new century is not accidental and timely. For today's West in general and for Russia in particular, a peculiar fascination with China, Chinese philosophy, culture, art, language, and hieroglyphic writing is characteristic. In various publications in Russian - not only scientific, but also mass - many Chinese proper names and terms have appeared. Chinese words get into Russian publications from sources of different levels-both Western and published not only and not so much in mainland China, but in economically developed Hong Kong (Hong Kong) and Taiwan with their long experience in publishing materials in English - and are often randomly written using Cyrillic graphics. The situation is also complicated by the fact that the Chinese-speaking area of Asia, which includes mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong (Hong Kong), Macao, Singapore, as well as the South Sea countries with their significant Chinese communities, is not linguistically homogeneous, which is enshrined in regional legislation.
In mainland China, more than half a century of efforts to spread a single supra - dialect means of communication - the national language of Putonghua, which is based on the Beijing dialect (phonetics) and more broadly-the northern dialects (vocabulary and grammar), have led to much more modest results than similar efforts in Taiwan. Nevertheless, in 2001, the law on language and writing, which is integrative in its orientation, came into force in the PRC, which instead of the dialects of different groups that are actually used in everyday life, proclaims Putonghua as the basic oral language of state and educational institutions, public speeches and the service sector. In Taiwan, where, by contrast, most of the population speaks southern dialects, but at the same time speaks the national Chinese language, a liberal disintegrating language law has been prepared, equalizing the rights of the island's dominant dialects and the "state language" of Guoyu - the equivalent of Putonghua on the continent. A special linguistic situation and, accordingly, legislative acts are characteristic of Hong Kong (Hong Kong). Here, until the return of this area to the PRC, there was an oral
1 L. R. Kontsevich is the author of about 300 works on Korean linguistics, cultural history, and history of Korean Studies. See, for example: L. R. Kontsevich Korean Studies. Selected works: Moscow: Muravey-Gaid, 2001, 640 p.; Hongmin chonym (Instruction to the people on correct pronunciation) / Research, translated from hanmun, notes and decree. L. R. Kontsevich, Moscow: Vostochnaya litra, 1979. 459+72 p. (Pamyatniki pismennosti Vostoka, LVIII); Kim Busik. Samguk sagi (Historical records of Three states). Vol. 3 / Ed. text, trans. from hanmun, intro. article, comment, adj. under total. Edited by M. N. Pak and L. R. Kontsevich, Moscow: Eastern Literature, 2000. He is the compiler and publisher of works by E. D. Polivanov on Oriental linguistics (1991), A. A. Kholodovich on medieval Korean (1986), and Y. N. Mazur on Korean Grammar (2001), as well as the author of translations of several collections of Korean classical literature, etc. - Ed.
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Bilingualism: almost the entire population spoke Cantonese and English, and the oral form of Putonghua was perceived as a foreign language [Zavyalova, 2005, pp. 157-167].
Contrary to the predictions of the last century, Chinese hieroglyphic writing not only survived, but also unexpectedly strengthened in the era of information technology. In parallel with the end of the XIX century. Legislated alphabetic systems have been developed and adopted for the Chinese language, along with many unofficial ones. A special place among them is occupied by the romanized pinyin tzimu, officially approved by the fifth session of the National People's Congress of the first convocation in 1958 and adopted in the 1970s as an international system for romanized transmission of Chinese words (pinyin tzimu can be translated as "phonetic" or "transcriptional" alphabet, in the reviewed monograph this system is called "Chinese phonetic alphabet", CFA)2. Detailed information on relevant decisions and official documents, including those of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), in the reviewed monograph can be found on pages 14-15; the appendix on pages 101-104 in the book contains a translation of "Hangyu pingying fang'an" ("Phonetic Writing Project for the Chinese language").
In 2002, after the publication of L. R. Kontsevich's book, Taiwan first adopted a new official system for writing Chinese words in Latin letters - tongyun pingyin ("common transcription"), which approximately 80% coincides with the continental pinyin tzimu, but differs from it in a number of features. The use of tongyun pinyin is still limited to official publications and selectively to place names on signs. Prior to 2002, only alphabets created before 1949 in the Republic of China were officially recognized in Taiwan: chuin tzimu, which is graphically constructed from elements of hieroglyphs and is still used in Taiwanese schools, and the "Romanized alphabet for the state language" by Guoyu lomazi. In 1984, the goyu lomatsui system with the letter designation of tones, which was rather complicated in the original version, was somewhat simplified, but in practice, Chinese proper names in Taiwanese publications (as well as in Hong Kong) were always transmitted in Latin letters in the English Wade-Giles system (read more about the history of the creation of Goyu lomatsui in its classical version, as well aszhuin tzimu in previously used Western romanized systems for writing Chinese words, see pages 141-154 of the peer-reviewed monograph).
One of the main tasks set out in the book by L. R. Kontsevich is to give practical recommendations on the uniform spelling of Russian words in Chinese texts, regardless of the source from which these words are borrowed and in which original Romanized system they are presented. Practical recommendations are preceded by two theoretical sections.
In the first section, the general principles of transmitting Chinese words by means of the Russian Cyrillic script and Russian orthography are formulated in the system of so-called traditional Russian transcription (TRT), developed by Academician V. P. Vasiliev in 1867 and finalized in the "Chinese-Russian Dictionary" of the arch. Palladium (P. I. Kafarov) and P. S. Popov in 1888 and updated in the works of Prof. E. D. Polivanov and other scientists after the spelling reform in 1917-1918 (on the differences between the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary TRT system, cf. pp. 17-18; for more information about the advantages and disadvantages of TRT, see the appendix on p. 96 - 100). Writing in TRT can be, firstly, based directly on readings of Chinese words in a hieroglyphic notation, which is not directly correlated with the sound of significant units; secondly, it can be performed with writing in various alphabetic systems, both official and unofficial, sometimes even dialect ones, which have been used since the end of the XIX century. for the Chinese language (the latter, for example, may occur in English texts when transmitting Hong Kong and Taiwanese anthroponyms).
The second section includes information on Chinese phonetics and phonology. The description is based on the European principle: from the Latin letters pinyin tzu-
2 The Chinese term pinyin zimu ("phonetic", "transcriptional" alphabet) not quite successful. As you know, all alphabetic systems, unlike hieroglyphic ones, are correlated with phonetic units of the language-phonemes, syllables (compare the syllabic Japanese alphabets katakana and hiragana), and sometimes reflect the phonetic features of certain sounds. In addition, pinyin tzimu is not only an alphabet in the form of a list of Latin letters used, but also a system for writing Chinese syllables using these letters, and a set of rules (not yet sufficiently developed) for writing syllables together and separately.
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mu and the sounds recorded by them (Table 1, p. 18-21) to correspondences between Ping'in tzimu and TRT (Table 2, p. 22-25) and, finally, to the structure and composition of Chinese syllables (Table 3, p. 26-27).
Transcription in the International phonetic Alphabet (IPA) system in a peer-reviewed book sometimes does not coincide with the one accepted in the PRC and Western works. In some cases, the variants given in the book are not quite accurate (compare, for example, the presence of a syllable-forming vowel in the final [iau] on page 20), but most often the discrepancies are due to different traditions of naming certain sounds in Russian and foreign sinology. I will give the most typical example. In the national Chinese language and most dialects, two sets of initial syllabic consonants and affricative consonants are opposed to each other not on the basis of deafness/sonority, as in Russian, but on the basis of breathiness/non-breathiness. Non-aspirated consonants, really deaf weak ones (lenis) can ring out to varying degrees in the intervocalic position (cf.the Russian word "papa", which in Chinese pronunciation can sound like "paba"), while aspirated ones always remain phonetically deaf. In most, though not all, alphabetic systems, Chinese non-breath consonants are indicated by letters for voiced consonants, and breath consonants are indicated by letters for deaf consonants (cf. b -, d -, etc.n -, t - in the TRT notation; b -, d-in contrast to the non-inhaled p -, t - in the pinyin izymu system). In the IPA entry in domestic works on Chinese phonetics and in a peer-reviewed book, non-breath consonants are presented as voiced consonants with a diacritic mark [0]. At the same time, in Chinese and Western works, even in the IPA system, these sounds are usually given as simply deaf, in contrast to the corresponding deaf aspirants; cf. [p] and [p'], [t] and [t'], etc.
However, for those Russian readers who just want to write Chinese words correctly, regardless of how they are pronounced in Chinese, such discrepancies in phonetic characteristics are not significant (although L. R. Kontsevich rightly considers it necessary to pay attention to the special use and reading of certain letters in the TRT system, not to mention the fact that they are not written correctly). characteristic features of the Russian language, pp. 27-29). Much more important for understanding the features of the phonetic system of the Chinese language as a whole and the mechanisms of writing Chinese words using alphabetic writing may be the analysis of the structure and composition of the syllable presented on pages 26-34 (see Table 3 on pages 26-27).
It is known that in Russian and in many other languages of the world, the minimum value that matters can be a single consonant or vowel sound - a phoneme. In the isolating languages of Asia, which are also called "syllabic" ("syllabic", "monosyllabic"), this role is usually played by a syllable - " morphosyllabeme "(the term of A. A. Dragunov [Dragunov, 1962])," syllable morpheme","syllabic morpheme". Morphemes that are large and especially shorter in length than a syllable are an exception here, since the boundaries of the syllable and morpheme usually coincide with each other. As in most other isolating languages, each syllable morpheme in Chinese is assigned one of the meaning-distinguishing tones - a special register or contour melodic characteristic of the syllable; the place and quality of stress are phonologically insignificant. On a letter, the syllable morpheme and, accordingly, the syllable almost always corresponds to a hieroglyph.
Phonetically (p. 25-34), the maximum version of a modern Chinese syllable consists of four components: an initial consonant, a subsequent non-syllable-forming vowel (medial), a syllable-forming vowel (central), and a final non-syllable-forming element. In the minimal version, the syllable consists of a syllable-forming vowel (in dialects - a sonant). The final non-syllable element in Putonghua can be vowels, as well as sonants -n and-n (hy and n, n and ng, respectively, in TRT andpinyin tzimu),in southern dialects-t In many dialects - not only southern (p. 34), but also northern-a guttural bow is possible at the end of a syllable in the syllables of the so-called "incoming" tone; in some southern dialects, final implosive consonants,which can be reflected in the traditional spelling of some proper names (for example, "Sun Yat-sen").
Although the minimum signifier of a morpheme in Chinese is usually a syllable, it can still be distinguished within a syllable at the phonological level: 1) the initial consonant (shengmu in Chinese linguistics, the initial in Western Sinology) and 2) the other, mostly vocal, part of the syllable (yunmu and final, respectively). Within the final, the medial and rhyme (yun) show relative phonological independence. The existence of a phonological boundary between initials and finals, and
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The relationship between medials and rhymes within finals is confirmed, in particular, by some morphonological processes in dialects (for example, alternations) and the rhyme system in poetry [Zavyalova, 1996, pp. 33-36]. The phonological structure of the Chinese syllable can be represented as the following scheme::
Since each syllable position uses only sounds from a certain limited set, the total number of syllables in isolating languages is relatively small. In the Beijing dialect and Putonghua, without taking into account tone differences, there are a little more than four hundred of them. Syllables can be easily defined in a list or table where initials are placed vertically, finals are placed horizontally, and syllables are placed at the intersection (where they are actually possible; not all initials are combined with all finals). An economical and visual "tabular" way of describing phonetic systems is one of the most common in Chinese linguistics, both traditional and modern. It is also used in the book by L. R. Kontsevich, for example: tables of initials and finals in the entry pinyin zimu (p. 102), zhuyin zimu (p. 151-152), as well as summary tables of initials and finals in the entry by Chinese official romanized alphabets and systems created for Chinese words in English, French and German (a total of 12 systems, including TRT, pp. 157-164).
The most important part of the reviewed monograph is also made up of a variety of reference tables (a list of them is given on page 6). They, in particular, make it easy to move from the Chinese syllable written in the Pinyin tzimu system and the Wade-Giles English system, which are most common in modern dictionaries and texts in English, to the syllable in the TRT notation. To identify any Chinese syllable that is fixed in Latin letters in texts in different languages created at different times (if we are not talking about dialect variants), you can use the consolidated "Alphabetical Index of Chinese syllables in Latin transcriptions", placed in Table 11 (pp. 167-227).
An extensive section of the book is devoted to the spelling of proper names, which usually make up most of the Chinese words in foreign texts. For the first time, onomastics is presented in detail for the most important object groups. Many of the relevant rules (the use of delimiters and quotation marks, hyphenation in the Russian text) also apply to Chinese words in general and, in fact, could be separated into a separate section.
The most difficult problem in the Chinese language is the problem of determining the word boundary and the associated rules for writing certain combinations of syllables together or separately (syllable morphemes). As you know, in the ancient Chinese language, a word was represented by a single monosyllabic root, in the modern language, words consisting of one, two or more syllable morphemes/syllables (roots and affixes) are possible. However, the word in Chinese and other isolating languages is not as important as in Russian. Along with words of the European type, Chinese has many combinations of syllable morphemes of a lesser degree of connectedness, and it is sometimes quite difficult to distinguish between a word and a phrase [Kasevich, 1986, p. 117].
Graphically, the modern Chinese text does not differ in any way from the ancient one or from the text in the archaic written language (Wengyang), whose position in China remained quite strong until the 1940s. Spaces between characters are the same as spaces between words, all characters follow each other at the same distance. For this reason, in Russian and other European texts, it has long been customary to write any Chinese words in syllables-separately or separated by a hyphen. In recent decades, in alphabetic systems (including pinyin tzimu), syllables within a word are written together whenever possible, although, as L. R. Kontsevich rightly notes (p. 37), in terms of perception of an individual Chinese word in a foreign-language text, its spelling by syllables, hyphenated or combined is ultimately insignificant-
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state-owned ones. Nevertheless, the introduction in Russian texts of a certain set of rules for unifying the spelling of Chinese words (pp. 37-43) seems important and necessary.
For the first time in Russian sinology, L. R. Kontsevich's book describes in detail the rules that are related to the typological features of the Russian language rather than Chinese. In the corresponding sections, the methods of forming adjectives and nouns from Chinese proper nouns, the rules of declension of the latter, and controversial cases of gender and number matching are presented (pp. 87-94). Since phonologically significant in Chinese is the melodic (contour and/or register) characteristic of each syllable (tone), and not the dynamic or other allocation of a syllable within a word, the rules for placing stress in Chinese words for each of their types are determined in Russian by tradition (see the main accent models of Chinese words given on page 93 - 94).
L. R. Kontsevich's book addresses not only the problems listed above, but also the whole range of practical and theoretical issues related to the unification of writing Chinese words in Russian texts. The monograph is based on a summary analysis of almost a century and a half of experience in using traditional Russian transcription, which has been improved by generations of Russian scientists. The recommendations contained in the book, which have been developed by the author over the years, will be useful for a wide range of specialists and non-specialists - all those who are connected with China by their occupation, want to write and read about this country, and learn Chinese.
list of literature
Dragunov A. A. Grammatical system of modern Chinese spoken language, Leningrad: LSU Publishing House, 1962.
Zavyalova O. I. Dialects of the Chinese language, Moscow: Nauchnaya kniga Publ., 1996.
Zavyalova O. I. Chinese-speaking area of Asia in the era of information technologies 11 Problems of the Far East. 2005. N 1.
Kasevich V. B. Morphonology, Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1986.
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