Ancient Indian and Chinese Models of Sound Classification and their Reflections in the Writing Systems

As early as in the 5th century BCE, Indian phoneticians studied exhaustively the process of producing speech sounds. They classified the sounds by place and manner of articulation as we see in the table of the Devanāgarī script. The ancient Indian model of sound classification is reflected in the order of signs of all the Indic scripts. The most outstanding common feature is found in the arrangement of the signs for the plosive consonants. That is, the signs are initiated with those for the velar plosives which are followed by those of other plosives grouped by the places of articulation. In each group the first sign is that representing the unaspirated-voiceless which is followed by the aspirated, the voiced, the voicedaspirated (where it is distinguished) and the nasal. Traditional Chinese studies on the speech sounds were mainly concerned with the classification of the initial consonants and rhymes of the syllables represented by individual characters. The initial consonants were classified roughly, not exactly, by five (or seven) places and four manners of articulation. The creators of the Korean alphabet in the 15th century classified the consonants in Korean utilizing the Chinese model and created the signs reflecting the systematic contrasts between the designated sounds.