This study is designed to discuss some problems related with initials in Liu Xi's Shiming which is a collection of "paranomastic glosses (聲訓)" of the Eastern Han time. There have been several studies about the phonological system of the Shiming and I find some matters in the predecessors' studies in question. I study whether zhang series (章組) words, yi initial (以母) words, and xie initial (邪母) words preserved their phonological forms of Pre-Qin Chinese, and what types of consonant clusters as initials existed in the Shiming.
This study reveals that words of zhang series were not palatalized and, consequently, yi initial words and xie initial words, which had frequent contacts with words of zhang series, still retained their Pre-Qin forms. There is some evidence for the existence of consonant clusters in the Shiming, while, in Standard Chinese of the period, some words seem to have lost the characteristics as clusters, and become simple initials.
The phonology of the Shiming in terms of the initial system was seemingly closer to Pre-Qin Chinese than to Standard Chinese of the Eastern Han time. This, however, does not necessarily mean that the Shiming phonology was returning to Pre-Qin Chinese, but means that Eastern Dialect of the Eastern Han, which the Shiming have most probably refelcted in some of its sound glosses, retained some characteristics of Pre-Qin Chinese.