The ''Grammata Serica Recensa'' is a dictionary of

Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...

and

Old Chinese Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 12 ...

published by the Swedish sinologist Bernard Karlgren in 1957.

History

Karlgren made fundamental contributions to the study of the phonology of Middle and Old Chinese, which he called Ancient and Archaic Chinese respectively. In the course of his study of the sound system of Old Chinese, Karlgren focused on clues provided by phono-semantic compound characters. His "homorganic principle", asserting that the initials of characters sharing a phonetic component had a common point of articulation, has been central to subsequent studies of Old Chinese. In 1923, Karlgren published his ''Analytic dictionary'' of Middle Chinese, which grouped characters by phonetic series and drew inferences about Old Chinese sounds. His ''Grammata Serica'' (1940) was an expanded dictionary that included Karlgren's Old Chinese reconstructions. An extensive revision incorporating the results of Karlgren's studies of pre-Han texts, the ''Grammata Serica Recensa'', appeared in 1957. It also indicated tones, which had been omitted in the first version. Although Karlgren's Old Chinese reconstructions have been superseded, his comprehensive dictionary remains a valuable reference for students of Old Chinese. As late as 1998, it was described as "the only good Chinese–English dictionary of Classical Chinese". Supplements to the GSR continue to appear to remedy such defects as the limited indexing and obsolete reconstructions. The

Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus The ''Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus'' (commonly abbreviated ''STEDT'') was a linguistics research project hosted at the University of California at Berkeley. The project, which focused on Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics, st ...

(STEDT) project uses an electronic form of the GSR and has donated a mapping to

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

, which is now included in the Unicode dataset.

Organization

Each numbered entry lists

character Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

s with a common phonetic element. Characters within each entry are labelled by lowercase letters (excluding "w"), supplemented with prime symbols, as required. Some are ancient variant forms. Each distinct character is given, with its pronunciation in Old Chinese,

and

Modern Standard Chinese Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standa ...

as well as definitions from ancient sources. A sample entry is (In the original, the characters are handwritten at the top of each page, separately from the text.) Tones, omitted in the earlier ''Grammata Serica'', are indicated in the Middle Chinese form by appending ":" (rising tone) or "-" (departing tone), with the level and entering tones unmarked. The names of texts containing the various uses are abbreviated, here Shï for ''

Shijing The ''Classic of Poetry'', also ''Shijing'' or ''Shih-ching'', translated variously as the ''Book of Songs'', ''Book of Odes'', or simply known as the ''Odes'' or ''Poetry'' (; ''Shī''), is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, co ...

'', '' Lunyü'' (''The Analects''), Tso for '' Zuo Zhuan'', Shu for '' Shujing'' and Yi for ''

I Ching The ''I Ching'' or ''Yi Jing'' (, ), usually translated ''Book of Changes'' or ''Classic of Changes'', is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zh ...

''. Entries are grouped according to the rhyme groups extracted by traditional Chinese scholarship from the rhyming practice of the ''Shijing'', in accordance with the observation of

Duan Yucai Duan Yucai () (1735–1815), courtesy name Ruoying () was a Chinese philologist of the Qing Dynasty. He made great contributions to the study of Historical Chinese phonology, and is known for his annotated edition of ''Shuowen Jiezi''. Biograph ...

that characters in the same phonetic series fell in the same rhyme group. The

radical Radical may refer to: Politics and ideology Politics * Radical politics, the political intent of fundamental societal change *Radicalism (historical), the Radical Movement that began in late 18th century Britain and spread to continental Europe an ...

index covers only the head character in each entry.

References

External links

* *
Unihan Database
The Unicode Consortium. {{Dictionaries of Chinese Old Chinese Chinese dictionaries Middle Chinese