潮州方言中聲調演變的問題

A NOTE ON TONE CHANGE IN THE CH'AO-CHOU DIALECT

王士元和鄭錦金（Cheng and Wang 1972）提出詞彙擴散理論的主要根據之一是潮州方言。這個方言有八個調，中古的濁聲母去聲字今音分讀陽上和陽去，分讀的比例非常接近： 濁去變陽上56 次濁去變陽上 69 濁去變陽去 61 次濁去變陽去 46 他們利用電腦檢查，找不出任何分化的條件。

Tone change in the Ch'ao-chou dialect is one major evidence of the theory of lexical diffusion proposed by Professors Cheng and Wang (1972; cf. Wang 1969, Wang and Cheng 1970, Chen and Wang 1975). They observe that, in the Ch'ao-chou dialect, the development of Ancient Chinese tone III syllables with voiced and sonorant initials exhibits a distribution in which the number of changed forms (2b 陽上) is approximately equal to that of the unchanged forms (3b 陽去), without any phonological conditions. The purpose of this paper is to show that the original data, which are based on the Han.yu Fang-yin Tzu-hui, actually contain two levels of divergent readings, i. e., colloquial and literary. Unusual distribution is due to the mixture of these two systems of readings.