William H. Baxter is Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research in historical linguistics includes work on both the history of Chinese and its dialects and on the use of mathematical techniques to reconstruct linguistic history.
Laurent Sagart is a senior scientist with the French CNRS. He has published widely in Chinese and East Asian language historical linguistics. He is interested in language classification, notably the internal classification of Austronesian, Sinitic and Sino-Tibetan, in the genetic relationships among East Asian language groups, and in East Asian linguistic prehistory.

This book introduces a new linguistic reconstruction of the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of Old Chinese, the language of the earliest Chinese classical texts (1st millennium BCE).

• 1 Introduction


• 1.1 What is Old Chinese?


• 1.2 Methodology


• 1.3 Plan of the book


• 2 The evidence for Old Chinese


• 2.1 Middle Chinese


• 2.2 Old Chinese rhyme evidence


• 2.3 Evidence from the Chinese script


• 2.4 Modern Chinese dialects


• 2.5 Early Chinese loanwords in other languages


• 2.6 Traditional Chinese texts explicitly discussing language


• 2.7 Tibeto-Burman


• 3 An overview of the reconstruction


• 3.1 Onsets: main hypotheses


• 3.2 Rhymes


• 3.3 Root structure, word structure, and affixation


• 3.4 The nature of the pre-Qín script


• 4 Onsets


• 4.1 The evolution of Old Chinese initial consonants: major processes


• 4.2 Applying the comparative method within Chinese


• 4.3 Singleton onsets


• 4.4 Tightly attached onsets


• 4.5 Onsets with loosely attached preinitials


• 4.6 Onsets with complex preinitials


• 5 Old Chinese rhymes


• 5.1 Overview: vowels, codas, postcodas


• 5.2 The six-vowel system


• 5.3 Rhyme development: main processes


• 5.4 Rhymes with back codas (*-Ø, *-k, and *-?)


• 5.5 Rhymes with acute codas (*-j, *-t, *-n, and *-r)


• 5.6 Rhymes with the codas *-w and *-wk


• 5.7 Rhymes with labial codas (*-p and *-m)


• 6 Conclusion


• 6.1 What kind of language was Old Chinese?


• 6.2 Dialect differences in Old Chinese


• 6.3 Known issues


• 6.4 General directions for future researc


• 6.5 Old Chinese in broad comparative context


• Appendix of reconstructed forms


• References