The Rules Governing the Split of the Entering Tone in the Beijing Dialect and the Relationships between the Northern Dialects

The Middle Chinese Entering Tone is usually split regularly into other tones in the Northern dialects, but the Beijing Dialect forms an exception. In the Beijing Dialect, characters of the voiceless Entering Tone seem to go to the four tones randomly, lacking a phonological correspondence with other dialects, thus causing enormous learning difficulty for other dialect speakers especially the Southerners. In this essay, the problem is tackled with historical sound change, which shows that the merging of unvoiced characters of the Middle Chinese Entering Tone into other tones in the Beijing dialect was regular, but it also received influences from neighboring dialects. Also, the evolution of the Entering Tone in Beijing was fundamentally different from other Northern dialects, and Zhongyuan Yinyuan could not have been its ancestor.