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

 641  The Structure of the Mandarin Syllable: why, when and how to teach it   • the vocalic subsystem: / a /, / o /, / e /, / i /, / u /, / / • the consonantal subsystem: / b /, / p /, / m /, / f /, / d /, / t /, / n / , / ng / , / l / ... etc. The speakers of languages which use the Latin script absorb the notions of vowels and consonants while learning to read and write. They work with them quite intuitively thereafter. For instance, a Western learner of Man- darin, when coming across the syllable kuan , recognizes a consonantal or vocalic affiliation of a particular segment without much hesitation, identify- ing the letters u, a as vowels and the letters k, n as consonants. This does not hold for native speakers of Chinese, however. The notion of vowels and consonants is by no means something familiar to them. The Chinese character script, as well as the centuries old Chinese phonological tradi- tion are based on rather different principles. Medieval Chinese phonology did not analyze a syllable into discrete segments. It did not develop a notion of vowels and consonants, instead establishing rather different concepts. In China the phonological ponderings were closely related to lexicology and the study of Chinese characters, not to the sounds as such. Kratochvil writes: “ …scholarly interest in language sounds in China has never been aroused simply because the sounds were there, but because they became relevant for some or other endeavour connected with the script. Sounds have thus never been considered in their own right, as raw bits of nature, so to speak, but only as abstract correlates to the units of the writing system ” [Kratochvil 1977: 18] . In other words, the basic unit of phonological interest in China was the syllable. The syllable was viewed as the reading of a particular Chinese character having an ability to rhyme with certain other syllables under specific conditions. A syllable was bisected into an initial consonant, and the rest of the syllable — the final (the f nqiè 反切 method). A specific object of interest was the subfinal, yùn (because of rhyming rules). The last stage of this tradition is reflected in the phonetic system Zhùyīn zìm 注音字 母 (created in 1913, officially approved in 1918). It moved one step further, trisecting a syllable into an initial, a medial, and a subfinal. A subfinal was not analyzed into segments, being always represented by a single symbol (for instance the syllable lan was written as ㄌㄢ , i. e. l-an, luan was written as ㄌㄨㄢ , i. e. l-u-an). Some modern Chinese phonologists claim that the traditional analysis is more suitable for Chinese than the analysis into vowel and consonant seg- ments. The article by You Rujie et al. 1980 suggests the following phonologi- cal elements along traditional lines: • sh ngwèi 声位 which can be translated as “the initialemes” • yùnwèi 韵位 which can be translated as “the finalemes” • diàowèi 调位 which can be translated as “the tonemes”