I am interested in finding out how the phonetic part in Chinese characters affects the pronunciation of these characters. In particular, I am interested in finding possible patterns or rules that relate to (historical) phonemic changes, existing or defunct dialects or other phenomena.
It is well known that the phonetic indicates *approximately* the pronunciation in about 90% of all Chinese characters. Early Western compendia of chinese characters were often arranged by these phonetic parts rather than the radical.
I would be very grateful to the community for any remarks (even concerning adjacent fields), suggestions for sources or any ideas you might have about this question.
EDIT: One first useful point from this discussion is to distinguish between modern and pre-simplification character variants.
You seem to have answered your own question. The relationship between the phonetic part of some characters and the Putonghua pronunciation is no longer transparent because of sound changes; whilst in some cases, the lack of transparency is due to the existence of variant readings (itself sometimes a result of diachronic processes affecting the phonemic inventory). I think the best way to get your finger round this whole business is to read up on the reconstruction of Middle Chinese from the Qieyun and modern day dialect pronunciation of characters.
In ancient Greece the diphtongues where pronounced very differently then they are today αι ει οι were pronounced a-y as high e-y as hey oi as oi in boil
the vowel η (eta) was pronounced ee e long . The intonation marks called oxia
varia and perispomeni varied the phonetic of the vowels the were put on.
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Modern Chinese? Did you mention the hinterland Simplified Mandarin Chinese? for some characters you could not recognize their phonetic part; e.g. 珉, sounds "min" by 民, whereas it was written like 玟 or 瑉. By the way, the same sound may be for many different phonetic part as in 梨, 沥, 狸. It's very crucial in building up a plausible model for the ends.
Are you also looking at the situations where one character may have multiple pronunciations here? That is probably going to be relevant as well. I'm thinking especially about things like 长, which has two similar pronunciations and where characters with a 长 in them tend to have the same pronunciation as one of them except for tones.
In our chapter in the "Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics, Volume I: Chinese," my colleague and I take on this question with an eye to the experience of the reader. The doi is...
10.2277/0521833337
@Douglas I am aware of the psycholinguistic dimension and that might indeed be a further topic in my work if there is not sufficient novelty in my description. I think a more relevant question would be how such discoveries can aid in the learning of Chinese.
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