A rime table or rhyme table is a syllable chart of the Chinese language, a significant advance on the fanqie analysis used in earlier rime dictionaries. As China's native phonological model, it tabulates the syllables of Middle Chinese by their onsets, rimes, grades of rime, tones and other properties.

Tradition holds that rime tables were invented by Buddhist monks, who were inspired by the Sanskrit syllable charts in the Siddham script they used to study the language. The Song Dynasty Yunjing and Qiyin lüe are the oldest extant rime tables. Based on numerous internal similarities, linguists conclude they shared a common prototype of phonological tables with accompanying texts, a tradition that may date back to the late Tang Dynasty. (Baxter 1992: 41)

Structure

A rime table book consists of a number of tabular charts, each devoted to either the "inner" (nèi 內) or "outer" (wài 外) part of a particular rime group (shè 攝). The inner/outer subdivision is thought to be related to the vocalic heights contrasting close vowels and open vowels respectively. Each shè (攝) is characterized as either "open" (kāi 開) and "closed" (hé 合), which are interpreted to indicate the absence or presence of lip rounding (often transcribed as -w- or -u-).

Within a table, syllables are classified using other features:

• The initial consonant (shēngmǔ 聲母 lit. "sound mother"). A syllable beginning with a vowel is considered to have a "zero initial." Initials are classified according to
• place of articulation: labials (chún 脣 "lip"), alveolars (shé 舌 "tongue"), velars (yá 牙 "back tooth"), affricates and sibilants (chǐ 齒 "front tooth"), and gutturals (hóu 喉 "throat"). The values of the last category remain controversial.
• phonation: voiceless (qīng 清 "clear"), voiceless aspirated (cìqīng 次清 "secondary clear"), voiced (zhuó 濁 "muddy") or nasal or liquid (qīngzhuó 清濁 "clear muddy").
• The tone (shēngdiào 聲調 "sound intonation"), using the same four tone names as used in the Qieyun. These tones differ from the four tones of Standard Mandarin, though related tone systems are retained by many southern languages. In particular, syllables ending in stops (-p, -t or -k) were classified as the entering tone of the corresponding syllables with nasal endings (-m, -n or -ng).
• The least understood classification is the four děng (等 "class", "grade" or "group"), which Bernhard Karlgren translated as "divisions" while other linguists prefer "grades". The exact nature of the grades is still open to debate, but is believed to describe palatalization (transcribed as the presence or absence of -j- or -i-), retroflex features, vowel quality (high vs. low) or some combination of these.

To illustrate the significance of děng, the science of classifying vowels is called děngyùn (等韻 "division rime") and traditional phonology is děngyùnxué (等韻學 "division rime study").

For example, Yùnjìng comprises 43 charts covering 16 rime groups. The following is the first chart (the arabic numerals are modern annotations):

The five big characters on the right-hand side read Nèi zhuǎn dìyī kāi (內轉第一開). In Yùnjìng, each chart is called a zhuǎn (lit. "turn"). The characters indicate that the chart is the first (第一) one in the book, and that the syllables of this chart are "inner" (內) and "open" (開).

Although the preface of Yunjing lists 36 onsets, the table contains only 23 columns, which means some columns represent more than one onset. This is possible because some onsets only combine with some particular grades of rime: say onset A only combines with grade 1 and 4, and onset B only with grade 2 and 3, then the same column can represent both onset A and B. This kind of space-saving representation can cause confusion, and results in so-called jiǎděng (假等 "pseudo-grade"): for example, a syllable shown to be grade-4 on the table is in fact grade-3, and finds itself at the grade-4 position only because the slot has been occupied by another syllable.

The 16 rows are grouped by tone into four yùn, or rimes (represented by the level-toned 東, the rising-toned 董, the departing-toned 送, and the entering-toned 屋). Each yùn has a row for each of the four grades. The symbol ○ indicates that there is no character with that particular syllable.

The pronunciation of a character as indicated by fanqie spelling can be known by looking at such a chart. However, due to sound change, the traditional fanqie spellings and the rime tables may become incongruous. In such cases some special rules, called menfa 門法, have been made to resolve the incongruities.

The 36 initials

		Clear 清	Aspirate 次清	Muddy 濁	Neither 清濁	Clear 清	Muddy 濁
Labials 脣	Bilabials	幫 *[p]	滂 *[pʰ]	並 *[b̥]	明 *[m]
	Labio-dentals	非 *[f]	(敷 *[fʰ])	(奉 *[v̥])	微 *[w̃]
Coronals 舌	Alveolar stops	端 *[t]	透 *[tʰ]	定 *[d̥]	泥 *[n]
	Palatals	知 *[tʲ]	徹 *[tʲʰ]	澄 *[d̥ʲ]	娘 *[nʲ]
Sibilants 齒	Alveolar	精 *[ts]	清 *[tsʰ]	從 *[d̥z̥]		心 *[s]	邪 *[z̥]
	Palatal/Retroflex	照	穿	牀		審	禪
Velars 牙		見 *[k]	谿 *[kʰ]	羣 *[ɡ̊]	疑 *[ŋ]
Gutturals 喉		影 *[ʔ]			喻 *[x]	曉 *[ɣ̊]	匣 *(null)
"Semi-coronal"					來 *[l]
"Semi-sibilant"					日 *[ȷ̃]

Notes

References

• Baxter, William H. (1992). A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Branner, David Prager (ed.) (2006). The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic Philosophy and Historical-Comparative Phonology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press.

See Also

• Origin of hangul

External links

• Rhyme Tables, Dylan W.H. Sung