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Reconstructions Of Old Chinese
Although Old Chinese is known from written records beginning around 1200 BC, the logographic script provides much more indirect and partial information about the pronunciation of the language than alphabetic systems used elsewhere. Several authors have produced reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology, beginning with the Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren in the 1940s and continuing to the present day. The method introduced by Karlgren is unique, comparing categories implied by ancient rhyming practice and the structure of Chinese characters with descriptions in medieval rhyme dictionaries, though more recent approaches have also incorporated other kinds of evidence. Although the various notations appear to be very different, they correspond with each other on most points. By the 1970s, it was generally agreed that Old Chinese had fewer points of articulation than Middle Chinese, a set of voiceless sonorants, and labiovelar and labio-laryngeal initials. Since the 1990s, mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period. Chinese bronze inscriptions, Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty. The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including Four Books and Five Classics, classical works such as the ''Analects'', the ''Mencius (book), Mencius'', and the ''Zuo Zhuan''. These works served as models for Literary Chinese (or Classical Chinese), which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving the vocabulary and grammar of late Old Chinese. Old Chinese was written with several early forms of Chinese characters, including Oracle bone script, oracle bone, Chinese bronze inscriptions, bronze, and seal scripts. Throughout t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rhyme Dictionary
A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book () is a genre of dictionary that records pronunciations for Chinese characters by tone (linguistics), tone and rhyme, instead of by graphical means like their Chinese character radicals, radicals. The most important rime dictionary tradition began with the (601), which codified correct pronunciations for reading the classics and writing poetry by combining the reading traditions of north and south China. This work became very popular during the Tang dynasty, and went through a series of revisions and expansions, of which the most famous is the ''Guangyun'' (1007–1008). These dictionaries specify the pronunciations of characters using the method, giving a pair of characters indicating the syllable onset, onset and remainder of the syllable respectively. The later rime tables gave a significantly more precise and systematic account of the sounds of these dictionaries by tabulating syllables by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xu Shen
Xu Shen () was a Chinese calligrapher, philologist, politician, and writer of the Eastern Han dynasty (25–189 CE). During his own lifetime, Xu was recognized as a preeminent scholar of the Five Classics. He was the author of ''Shuowen Jiezi'','' Daijisen'' entry "Xu Shen" (''Kyo Shin'' in Japanese). Shogakukan.'' Kanjigen'' entry "Xu Shen" (''Kyo Shin'' in Japanese). Gakken, 2006. which was the first comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters, as well as the first to organize entries by radical. This work continues to provide scholars with information on the development and historical usage of Chinese characters. Xu Shen completed his first draft in 100 CE but, waited until 121 CE before having his son present the work to the Emperor An of Han. Life Xu was born about 58 CE in the Zhaoling district of Run'an prefecture (modern Luohe in Henan). He was a student of the scholar-official Jia Kui (30–101 CE). Under Jia, he established himself as a master in his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phono-semantic Compound
Chinese characters are generally logographs, but can be further categorized based on the manner of their creation or derivation. Some characters may be analysed structurally as compounds created from smaller components, while some are not decomposable in this way. A small number of characters originate as pictographs and ideographs, but the vast majority are what are called ''phono-semantic compounds'', which involve an element of pronunciation in their meaning. A traditional six-fold classification scheme was originally popularized in the 2nd century CE, and remained the dominant lens for analysis for almost two millennia, but with the benefit of a greater body of historical evidence, recent scholarship has variously challenged and discarded those categories. In older literature, Chinese characters are often referred to as "ideographs", inheriting a historical misconception of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Overview Chinese characters have been used in several different writ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Huang Kan
Huang Kan ( Chinese: 黃侃; 1886 – 8 October 1935), courtesy name Jigang (季剛), born into a family of Hubei ancestry in Chengdu, Sichuan province, was a Chinese phonologist, philologist and revolutionary. As a teen, he tested into Wuchang School, a prestigious secondary school, but then was expelled for spreading anti- Qing sentiments. He then went to study in Japan and became a student of the Chinese scholar and philologist Zhang Taiyan. Huang was regarded as the most important phonologist since the high Qing (1644–1912) and gained recognition at first through his literary criticism of the sixth century. Later on, he taught at a number of universities in mainland China. Huang's major contribution lies in his research on ancient Chinese phonology. He was the first to question established theories of rhyme schemes (patterns of sounds at the end of lines in poetry) in ancient literature. Huang proposed twenty-eight variations instead of the older version of twenty-six var ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diasystem
In the field of dialectology, a diasystem or polylectal grammar is a linguistic analysis set up to encode or represent a range of related varieties in a way that displays their structural differences. The term ''diasystem'' was coined by linguist and dialectologist Uriel Weinreich in a 1954 paper as part of an initiative in exploring how to extend advances in structuralist linguistic theory to dialectology to explain linguistic variation across dialects. Weinreich's paper inspired research in the late 1950s to test the proposal. However, the investigations soon showed it to be generally untenable, at least under structuralist theory. With the advent of generative theory in the 1960s, researchers tried applying a generative approach in developing diasystemic explanations; this also fell short. According to some leading sociolinguists, the diasystem idea for incorporating variation into linguistic theory has been superseded by William Labov's notion of the linguistic variabl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sinoxenic
Sino-Xenic vocabularies are large-scale and systematic borrowings of the Chinese lexicon into the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, none of which are genetically related to Chinese. The resulting Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies now make up a large part of the lexicons of these languages. The pronunciation systems for these vocabularies originated from conscious attempts to consistently approximate the original Chinese sounds while reading Classical Chinese. They are used alongside modern varieties of Chinese in historical Chinese phonology, particularly the reconstruction of the sounds of Middle Chinese. Some other languages, such as Hmong–Mien and Kra–Dai languages, also contain large numbers of Chinese loanwords but without the systematic correspondences that characterize Sino-Xenic vocabularies. The term was coined in 1953 by the linguist Samuel E. Martin from the Greek (, 'foreign'); Martin called these borrowings "Sino-Xenic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Song Dynasty
The Song dynasty ( ) was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 960 to 1279. The dynasty was founded by Emperor Taizu of Song, who usurped the throne of the Later Zhou dynasty and went on to conquer the rest of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period#Ten Kingdoms, Ten Kingdoms, ending the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. The Song frequently came into conflict with the contemporaneous Liao dynasty, Liao, Western Xia and Jin dynasty (1115–1234), Jin dynasties in northern China. After retreating to southern China following attacks by the Jin dynasty, the Song was eventually conquered by the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The History of the Song dynasty, dynasty's history is divided into two periods: during the Northern Song (; 960–1127), the capital was in the northern city of Bianjing (now Kaifeng) and the dynasty controlled most of what is now East China. The #Southern Song, 1127–1279, Southern Song (; 1127–1279) comprise the period following ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rhyme Table
A rime table or rhyme table ( zh, t=韻圖, s=韵图, p=yùntú, w=yün-t'u) is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the ''Qieyun'' (601) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties. The method gave a significantly more precise and systematic account of the sounds of those dictionaries than the previously used analysis, but many of its details remain obscure. The phonological system that is implicit in the rime dictionaries and analysed in the rime tables is known as Middle Chinese, and is the traditional starting point for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. Some authors distinguish the two layers as Early and Late Middle Chinese respectively. The earliest rime tables are associated with Chinese Buddhist monks, who are believed to have been inspired by the Sanskrit syllable charts in the Siddham script they used to study the language. The oldest extant rime tables are the 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chen Li (scholar)
Chen Li (1810–1882) was a Cantonese scholar of the evidential research school, known for his contributions to historical Chinese phonology. Chen Li's family originally came from Shaoxing prefecture in Zhejiang province, moving to Nanjing in the early Ming dynasty. Chen's grandfather moved to Guangzhou, where his two sons remained after his death. Chen Li was the first in his family to register as a Guangzhou resident. He passed the provincial examination in 1832, but was unsuccessful in the imperial examination seven times. He also sat examinations at the Xuehaitang Academy in Guangzhou, headed by Ruan Yuan, and taught there as co-director for several decades from 1840. In his pioneering ''Qièyùn kǎo'' (切韻考 "An examination of the ''Qieyun''", 1842), Chen systematically analysed the pairs of characters (''fanqie'') used to indicate pronunciations of words in the ''Guangyun'', a Song dynasty redaction of the ''Qieyun'' dictionary published in 601. Chen was able to enum ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
