The Old Chinese Sound Change *-ps *-ts -jH: Insights from Zhou Excavated Documents

Linguists generally believe that the Old Chinese sound change *-ps > *-ts is took place early enough to affect rhyming in the Book of Odes, i.e., during the Zhou Dynasty (Pullyblank 1961-2, Bodman 1980, Starostin 1989, Baxter 1992, etc.). However, some scholars in Chinese paleography hold the more cautious view that the rhyme patterns in the Odes are not enough to prove that this sound change occurred in the Western Zhou Dynasty. They argue that these patterns may be due to the scarcity of characters with the *-ps coda, and that the sound change took place later. Such scholars point to the evidence of graphic structure (xiéshēng) and spelling variation (tōngjiǎ) in Warring States excavated documents as more reliable evidence that the sound change occurred no later than this period (Fuhai Zhang 2019). This talk examines the Western Zhou excavated documents and use of xiéshēng and tōngjiǎ evidence to argue that the sound change *-ps > *-ts did indeed occur in this period. I believe that this provides additional evidence to support the view that this sound change took place early in the history of Chinese.

Jinqi Ying is a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin, researching the reconstruction of Old Chinese consonant clusters. She earned her BA at Xiamen University in 2020 and her Masters in Chinese Paleography from Fudan University in 2023.