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Research on the phonological history of a language often relies on written materials, and in this regard Chinese characters, which have been in continuous use from their creation several thousand years ago until the present, may seem to be a boon in the diachronic study of Chinese. However, Chinese characters are logographic. In other words, a character typically represents a morpheme, monosyllabic in pronunciation but giving no direct information about the phonetic make-up of the syllable. Furt…

Pò 破 literally means ‘break’,  pòyīn 破音 ‘break the pronunciation’, that is: break the usual convention in pronouncing a Chinese character, not to read it in its usual pronunciation. Pòyīnzì 破音字 then refers to a character having, in addition to its usual pronunciation, another pronunciation for a different meaning. There are two major reasons for the emergence of pòyīnzì. First, there is the loangraph ( jiǎjiè 假借) phenomenon. When referring to a morpheme that lacked a character or that had not been consistently represented by a single character, ancient wri…

Fǎnqiè 反切 is a traditional convention for showing the pronunciation of Chinese characters, which are logographic and almost always monosyllabic in pronunciation. The convention uses different components in the pronunciations of two characters to put together the pronunciation of another character. Specifically, the initial of the first character combines with the final (including the tone) of the second character to render a monosyllabic pronunciation. For example, one may encounter the four-character sequence sǎo, sū lǎo fǎn 嫂, 蘇老反, which means the pronunciation of th…

Edwin George Pulleyblank was born into a family of school teachers on August 7, 1922 in Calgary, Canada. In 1939, he finished secondary education and attended the University of Alberta on a provincial government scholarship. He graduated in 1942, majoring in Latin and Greek Classics. With this linguistic background and a fondness of mathematics, supported by his father, a mathematics teacher, since childhood, Pulleyblank was then recruited to join the “Ultra” intelligence project in cryptanalysi…