This article is aimed at a special audience, namely, the scholars who are already very familiar with the details of Pekingese phonetics but are nevertheless still keenly interested in its theoretical interpretation. The purpose of this study is to present, through examining some previous studies on Pekingese phonology, a new analytical interpretation of the phonemic structure of the Pekingese syllable finals. In this process, it tries to demonstrate that classical studies on this subject, such as Hartman 1944 and Hockett 1947, are either descriptively inadequate or theoretically unsound, or both. The basic premise of this study is its author's conviction that the truly phonemic study of a language must always be an accurate reflexion of, or a logical explanation for, the feeling of its native speakers, in particular, their habit of rhyming. It concludes that Pekingese has indeed three vowel phonemes, but proposes a new theory to account for their distribution. On this basis, a very simple and logical specification of the morphophonemic process of r-suffixation in Pekingese phonology is presented.
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