Editing Mandarin Chinese (section)

===Old Mandarin===
{{main|Old Mandarin}}
[[File:蒙古字韻24b (cleaned).png|thumb|right|A page of the ''[[Menggu Ziyun]]'', covering the syllables ''tsim'' to ''lim'']]

After the fall of the [[Song dynasty#Northern Song, 960–1127|Northern Song]] (959–1126) and during the reign of the [[Jin dynasty (1115–1234)|Jin]] (1115–1234) and [[Yuan dynasty|Yuan]] (Mongol) dynasties in northern China, a common form of speech developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital, a language referred to as Old Mandarin. New genres of vernacular literature were based on this language, including verse, drama and story forms, such as the ''[[Qu (poetry)|qu]]'' and ''[[sanqu]]'' poetry.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=48–49}}

The rhyming conventions of the new verse were codified in a [[rime dictionary]] called the ''[[Zhongyuan Yinyun]]'' (1324). A radical departure from the [[rime table]] tradition that had evolved over the previous centuries, this dictionary contains a wealth of information on the phonology of Old Mandarin. Further sources are the [['Phags-pa script]] based on the Tibetan alphabet, which was used to write several of the languages of the Mongol empire, including Chinese and the ''[[Menggu Ziyun]]'', a rime dictionary based on 'Phags-pa. The rime books differ in some details, but overall show many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects, such as the reduction and disappearance of final plosives and the reorganization of the Middle Chinese tones.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=49–51}}

In Middle Chinese, initial [[stop consonant|stops]] and [[affricate consonant|affricates]] showed a three-way contrast between [[tenuis consonant|tenuis]], voiceless aspirated and voiced consonants. There were [[four tones (Middle Chinese)|four tones]], with the fourth or "entering tone", a [[checked tone]] comprising syllables ending in plosives (''-p'', ''-t'' or ''-k''). Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch and by the late [[Tang dynasty]], each of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials. When voicing was lost in all languages except the Wu subfamily, this distinction became phonemic and the system of initials and tones was rearranged differently in each of the major groups.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=34–36, 52–54}}

The ''Zhongyuan Yinyun'' shows the typical Mandarin four-tone system resulting from a split of the "even" tone and loss of the entering tone, with its syllables distributed across the other tones (though their different origin is marked in the dictionary). Similarly, voiced plosives and affricates have become voiceless aspirates in the "even" tone and voiceless non-aspirates in others, another distinctive Mandarin development. However, the language still retained a final ''-m'', which has merged with ''-n'' in modern dialects and initial voiced fricatives. It also retained the distinction between velars and alveolar sibilants in palatal environments, which later merged in most Mandarin dialects to yield a palatal series (rendered ''j-'', ''q-'' and ''x-'' in [[pinyin]]).{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=49–50}}

The flourishing vernacular literature of the period also shows distinctively Mandarin vocabulary and syntax, though some, such as the third-person pronoun {{zhp|p=tā|c=他}}, can be traced back to the Tang dynasty.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=111–132}}