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Methods: A substantial portion of HHY was digitized and aligned with Chinese phonological categories. Previous reconstructions of individual language sections were critically reviewed and integrated into a unified comparative database. The analysis focuses on cross-linguistic regularities in Main Transcription (MT) and Supplementary Transcription (ST) across eight language sections.
Results: MT generally represents sounds compatible with the Chinese syllable structure of the period, whereas ST mainly encodes phonetic features less compatible with Chinese phonology. The analysis further shows that Chinese phonological categories were used more flexibly in foreign-language transcription than previously assumed. HHY therefore functioned as a relatively systematic method of phonetic approximation rather than a direct projection of Chinese phonology onto non-Chinese languages.
Conclusion: HHY can be analyzed as an internally structured transcription system rather than merely as a collection of glossaries. More broadly, the study demonstrates that historical transcription systems can provide valuable evidence for historical phonology, particularly for under-documented Asian languages with limited historical records.
| Comments: | 49 pages; 1 figure; 40 tables; SLE2019; under review |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.14480 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.14480v2 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.14480 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
From: Ji-Eun Kim [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 14 May 2026 07:21:18 UTC (441 KB)
[v2]
Tue, 26 May 2026 00:01:30 UTC (448 KB)
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