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The terms “literary reading” ( wéndú 文讀) and “colloquial reading” ( báidú 白讀) refer to different readings (“pronunciations”) of the same character depending on whether it represents a morpheme in the colloquial or the literary lexical layer. Thie phenomenon is widespread in Sinitic languages and has existed for a long time. In his 11th-century book Guī tián lù 歸田錄 [Recordings of my return to the fields], Ōuyáng Xiū 歐陽修 (1007–1072) notes that in ordinary speech, including that of well-educated people, the common verb dǎ 打 ‘hit, do’ is pronounced as an open syllable (ancestral to modern dǎ)…