1 International Symposium on "Tone languages in the world" December 10-12, 1998 Tokyo The origin of Chinese tones by Laurent Sagart CRLAO, EHESS URA 1025 du CNRS Paris, France ----------- 1. INTRODUCTION The long literary tradition of Chinese opens for us a window on the early history of the language. A continuous tradition of old literary texts, the earliest of which date from the early years of the 1st millennium BCE, have been handed down to us more or less intact; in addition, epigraphy provides us with an increasingly large corpus of old inscriptions: oracular inscriptions on shells and bones, known as Jiaguwen 甲骨文, and dating from the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE, as well as inscriptions on bronze vessels (Jinwen 金文) dating from the 1st millennium BCE. That these texts and inscriptions provide us with ample opportunities to study the grammar and lexicon of the language is self-evident: but, given the non-alphabetic nature of the Chinese script, it may be necessary here to say a few words of the methods of Old Chinese reconstruction in the phonological domain. Only limited attempts at applying the comparative method to the pronunciation of earlier stages of Chinese have so far been made: were a systematic reconstructive effort to be mounted on the basis of the diversity found in modern Chinese dialects, it would probably not lead to stages of the language nearly as old as the earliest texts and inscriptions: due to widespread language leveling in the North, most of the linguistic diversity is now found in southeast China, an area not settled by Chinese speakers before (and often much later than) the second century BCE. The method of Old Chinese reconstruction is sui generis: it makes use of two independent, yet mutually supporting bodies of data: the poetic rhyme sequences in the Shi Jing 詩經 (Book of Odes), a compilation dating to the middle of the first millennium BCE, but known to us in a version crystallized towards the end of the 3rd century BCE; and the phonetic element in the Chinese script, which reflects the pronunciation of Chinese also in the latter half of the first millennium BCE. The basic principle (same phonetic graph in the script > same rhyme in the Odes) relating these two bodies of data was discovered by the eminent Chinese philologist Duan Yucai 段玉裁 (1735-1815).