Tonal Patterns in the 15th Century: A Corpus-Based Approach

This paper investigates the tonal patterns in the 15 th century from a corpus-based approach, focusing on two historical sources, 日 本 館 譯 語 Rìbĕn kuăn yìyŭ ‘A Wordlist of Chinese-Japanese Phrases’ and 朝 鮮 館 譯 語 Cháoxiān kuăn yìyŭ ‘A Wordlist of ChineseKorean Phrases’. The results suggest that Japanese and Korean are signiifcantly different in the phonetic transcription of low tone in monosyllabic words and in the first syllable of a disyllabic word. The results also suggest that Mandarin Chinese in the 15th century tends to be a falling tone in the second syllable of a disyllablic word.