6th International Symposium Oriental Studies

The 6 th International Symposium on Oriental Ancient Documents Studies 76 Shen Zhongwei Accented Mandarin of the Early 14 th Century as Seen in the Persian Transcriptione In the early 14 th c. a Chinese medical treatise named Mai Jue 脉訣 was translated into Persian in Arabic script. It was collected in a book compiled by Rashīd entitled Tanksūqnāma-i Īl-khān dar funūn-i ‘ulūm-i Khatāyī , ‘Book of Precious Information of the Īlkhān on the Various Branches of Chinese Sciences’. The nature of this type of records of Chinese is that they are the more or less spontaneous recordings of real pronunciation without refereeing to the fixed phonological structures in the format of traditional rhyming dictionaries or tables. The Chinese transcriptions in this document have been first studied by former Soviet linguist Alexander Dragunov based on 12 photographs taken from a hand written copy of the manuscript (Dragunov 1931). Japanese linguists Mantaro Hashimoto and Endō Mitsuaki also studied this manuscript. Endō’s article (Endō 1997/2001) is a summary report of this manuscript providing many useful pieces of information about the manuscript, especially the sequential order of the poems in relationship with the Chinese versions of the Mai Jue . Because of Endō’s study, the identification of the Chinese poems becomes much easier to carry out. In his study Endō points out an interesting phenomenon, that from page 434 on some of the Middle Chinese ru syllables start showing stop codas -p, -t, -k. This phenomenon was not mentioned by Dragunov is his article of 1931 due to the limited material available to him. In the phonology of Old Mandarin the Middle Chinese ru syllables have lost oral stop codas. Dragunov provides some examples of the ru syllables to illustrate this interesting phenomenon (add Endō’s examples). Based on this particular feature Endō concludes that there were two Chinese speakers involved in the Persian transcription. Speaker A is a Mandarin speaker from north, and Speaker B is a non-Mandarin speaker from south. However, beside the -p, -t, -k stop codas, the phonological characteristics of Speaker B are similar to