Readers 读者
A Chinese phonological enigma
(article for discussion)
汉语音韵里的一个谜 (讨论文章）
Geoffrey Sampson 散复生
Abstract 摘要
Recent cross-language research has yielded strong statistical evidence in support of the idea, advocated by André Martinet and widely accepted by linguists, that languages avoid adopting sound-changes which would create many homophones. Yet we know that the history of Chinese phonology has been marked by repeated phoneme mergers and losses which led to a very high incidence of homophony, forcing the monomorphemic vocabulary of the classical language to be replaced by a largely bimorphemic modern vocabulary. This paper examines various ways in which this apparent contradiction might be resolved. None seems fully satisfactory, yet some resolution must exist.
安德烈・马蒂内（André Martinet）提出对于会产生很多同音异义词的变音形式，语言会避免引入；该观点已广为语言学家们所接受。近期的跨语言研究已提供有力的统计数据来支持这一观点。然而，我们知道汉语音韵学的发展历史特点是音素的不断合并和丢失，导致同音现象的几率很高， 使得古代语言的单音素词汇被以双音素为主的现代词汇所代替。本文考察了各种不同的方法来尝试解决这个突出的矛盾。 似乎没有一种方法完全令人满意， 然而某种解决方法肯定存在。
Keywords 关键词
Homophones 同音字词 Homophony avoidance 同音异义回避 Functional yield 功能效益 Functional load 功能负荷量 Martinet 安德烈