Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 621  The Structure of the Mandarin Syllable: why, when and how to teach it   and orientalist V. B. Kasevich in the 1960s. The third term was coined by another Russian linguist — A. A. Moskalev, also in the 1960s. These three terms have a number of advantages: they share the same suffix -al with the terms initi al , fin al , medi al ; they are short, unambiguous, and they are lan- guage specific: they refer to the components of a Chinese syllable, not of a general abstract syllable scheme (as is the case with the expressions such as main vowel, nucleus, coda or rhyme/rime , which are regularly used in syllab- le theory). The terms централ, терминал, субфинал appear for instance in a Russian textbook on Mandarin phonetics by [Speshnev 1972, 1980, 2003]. Their conversion into Czech is quite smooth: centr la, termin la, subfin la (it is immediately clear by their morphology that they are nouns; the same holds for their Russian versions). The translation of централъ, терминалъ and субфиналъ into English is less advantageous: the words central, termi- nal and subfinal may be either nouns, or adjectives; however, the same is also true for the words initial and final . We presume that the terms a terminal and a subfinal may be employed without much trouble; we accept them. The remaining term a central is questionable, however — it can possibly be confused with an adjective referring to the tongue position during the articu- lation of a vowel, as in the expression “a central vowel” (cf. “a front vowel”, “a back vowel”). One could possibly think of coining a new English term for the main vowel of the Chinese syllable, also containing the suffix -al , e. g. “a principal”. The result would be a neat set of labels with an identical ending -al for all components of the Mandarin syllable, except for the tone. Further- more, we wish to make a terminological remark concerning the component of a medial . In the phonetic / phonological descriptions the medials / i /, / u /, / / are commonly characterized as glides (being transcribed as [j], [w], [ɥ] ), or alternatively as semivowels (being transcribed as [i̯], [u̯], [y̆] ; a diacriti- cal arc indicates a vowel is non-syllabic). We prefer to avoid the latter term (as well as the latter transcriptions) as being somewhat confusing. Another option is to use a rather modern term, approximant , instead of a glide (note that it may cover a slightly broader range of sounds than the term glide — de- pending on the author). In such a case the transcriptions [j], [w], [ɥ] should be employed (see also below). The Initial-Final model draws on the traditions of medieval Chinese phi- lology. The origins of the phonological concepts embodied in this model can be traced back to the ancient rhyming dictionaries, in particular to the oldest rhyming dictionary that has been preserved — Qièyùn 切韵 (A.D. 601). In this dictionary, a “spelling” system fǎnqiè 反切 was used systematically. The f nqiè system indicates the reading of an unknown character by using two other, presumably known, characters. The first one represents an initial con-