Review Questions for Historical Reconstruction

 

1.What kinds of foreign evidence are used in comparative reconstruction?

2.What is alliteration?  What is rhyming?

3.What is an initial?  What is a final?

4.How is Fanqie used to indicate pronunciation?

5.How is Fanqie an improvement over the previous ways to indicate pronunciation?

6.What can rhyme dictionaries tells us?

7.How can semantic-phonetic compounds be used for historical reconstruction?

8.Why is dialectal/foreign evidence different in kind from that of written materials?

9.Why is Chinese called a Sino-Tibetan language?

10.What kind of evidence is used to figure out genetic relationship between languages?