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Mei Yingzuo
The 1615 ''Zìhuì'' is a Chinese dictionary edited by the Ming Dynasty scholar Mei Yingzuo ( 梅膺祚). It is renowned for introducing two lexicographical innovations that continue to be used in the present day: the 214-radical system for indexing Chinese characters, which replaced the classic ''Shuowen Jiezi'' dictionary's 540-radical system, and the radical-and-stroke sorting method. Title The dictionary title combines ''zì'' "character; script; writing; graph; word" and ''huì'' "gather together; assemble; collection; list". Early forms of the graph ''huì'' 彙 depicted a "hedgehog" (''wèi'' ), and it was borrowed as a phonetic loan character for the word huì "gather together; collection", both of which, in the simplified character system, are . In modern Chinese usage, ''zìhuì'' or means "glossary; wordbook; lexicon; dictionary; vocabulary; (computing) character set" (''Wenlin'' 2016). English translations of ''Zihui'' include "Compendium of Characters", "Col ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jincheng
Jincheng is a prefecture-level city in the southeast of Shanxi province, China, bordering Henan province to the south and southeast. It is an industrial city in an area where coal mining is an important industry. The entire city has a population of 2.2 million. The presence of such a large coal industry has given Jincheng a reputation for air pollution and in recent years the local government has invested heavily to promote better air quality in the city. This includes tree planting, establishing and maintaining large parks and ecological reserves, shutting down or relocating some of the worst-polluting factories, and the generalized use of coalbed methane which burns much cleaner than coal. History Jincheng has a long history. During the Warring States period, Zhao, Wei and han divided the land of Jinguo and settled the Late Jin monarch in Qinshui County of Jincheng. At the end of the Warring States period, the famous battle of Changping broke out between Qin and Zhao, which ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stroke Order
Stroke order is the order in which the strokes of a Chinese character (or Chinese derivative character) are written. A stroke is a movement of a writing instrument on a writing surface. Chinese characters are used in various forms in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. They are known as '' Hanzi'' in (Mandarin) Chinese (Traditional form: ; Simplified form: ), ''kanji'' in Japanese (), and ''Hanja'' in Korean (). Basic principles Chinese characters are basically logograms constructed with strokes. Over the millennia a set of generally agreed rules have been developed by custom. Minor variations exist between countries, but the basic principles remain the same, namely that writing characters should be economical, with the fewest hand movements to write the most strokes possible. This promotes writing speed, accuracy, and readability. This idea is particularly important since as learners progress, characters often get more complex. Since stroke order also aids learning and memorizati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Classics
Chinese classic texts or canonical texts () or simply dianji (典籍) refers to the Chinese texts which originated before the imperial unification by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, particularly the "Four Books and Five Classics" of the Neo-Confucian tradition, themselves a customary abridgment of the "Thirteen Classics". All of these pre-Qin texts were written in classical Chinese. All three canons are collectively known as the classics ( t , s , ''jīng'', lit. "warp"). The term Chinese classic texts may be broadly used in reference to texts which were written in vernacular Chinese or it may be narrowly used in reference to texts which were written in the classical Chinese which was current until the fall of the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, in 1912. These texts can include ''shi'' (, historical works), ''zi'' (, philosophical works belonging to schools of thought other than the Confucian but also including works on agriculture, medicine, mathematics, astronomy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hongwu Emperor
The Hongwu Emperor (21 October 1328 – 24 June 1398), personal name Zhu Yuanzhang (), courtesy name Guorui (), was the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty of China, reigning from 1368 to 1398. As famine, plagues and peasant revolts increased across China proper in the 14th century, Zhu Yuanzhang rose to command the Red Turban forces that conquered China proper, ending the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty and forcing the remnant Yuan court (known as Northern Yuan in historiography) to retreat to the Mongolian Plateau. Zhu claimed the Mandate of Heaven and established the Ming dynasty at the beginning of 1368 and occupied the Yuan capital, Khanbaliq (present-day Beijing), with his army that same year. Trusting only his family, he made his many sons feudal princes along the northern marches and the Yangtze valley.Chan Hok-lam.Legitimating Usurpation: Historical Revisions under the Ming Yongle Emperor (r. 14021424)". ''The Legitimation of New Orders: Case Studies in World History ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Song Lian
Song Lian (; 1310–1381), courtesy name Jinglian (), was a Chinese historian and politician of the Ming dynasty. He was a literary and political advisor to the Hongwu Emperor. Before that, he was one of the principal figures in the Yuan dynasty's Jinhua school of Neo-Confucianism. As a head of the official ''Bureau of History'' of the Ming dynasty, Song Lian directed the compilation of the official dynastic history of the preceding Yuan dynasty. The compilation of the ''History of Yuan'', commissioned by the court of the Ming dynasty, was completed in 1370. Under the guidance of Song Lian, the official dynastic history broke with the old Confucian historiographical tradition, and established a new historical paradigm professing that the influence of history was equal in influence to the great Confucian classics in directing the human affairs. In Asian historiography, the ''History of Yuan'' is a major source for the study of the histories of the Han, Tungusic, Mongol, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Headword
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural ''lemmas'' or ''lemmata'') is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' are forms of the same lexeme, with ''break'' as the lemma by which they are indexed. ''Lexeme'', in this context, refers to the set of all the inflected or alternating forms in the paradigm of a single word, and ''lemma'' refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Arabic, Turkish and Russian. The process of determining the ''lemma'' for a given lexeme is called lemmatisation. The lemma can be viewed as the chief of the principal parts, although lemmatisation is at least partly arbitrary. Morphology The form of a word that is chosen to serve as the lemma is usually the least marked form, but there are several exceptions such as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Earthly Branches
The twelve Earthly Branches or Terrestrial Branches are a Chinese ordering system used throughout East Asia in various contexts, including its ancient dating system, astrological traditions, zodiac and ordinals. Origin This system was built from observations of the orbit of Jupiter. Chinese astronomers divided the celestial circle into 12 sections to follow the orbit of ''Suìxīng'' (Jupiter, the Year Star). Astronomers rounded the orbit of Suixing to 12 years (from 11.86). Suixing was associated with ''Shètí'' (η Boötis) and sometimes called Sheti. Jonathan Smith has proposed that the first meanings of the earthly branches, predating the Shang dynasty, were phases of the moon, with the heavenly stems at that point referring to divisions of the ecliptic. After being adopted as a calendar these would have lost their clear lunar reference, permitting their repurposing for Jupiter stations. History In correlative thinking, the 12 years of the Jupiter cycle also identif ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Body Text
__NOTOC__ The body text or body copy is the text forming the main content of a book, magazine, web page, or any other printed or digital work. This is as a contrast to both additional components such as headings, images, charts, footnotes etc. on each page, and also the pages of front matter that form the introduction to a book. Body text has two slightly different meanings, depending on context. A book designer, concerned with the overall sequence of a book, regards it as those pages that form the majority of a book, containing the ''body of text'' or '' body matter''. A typesetter concerned instead with the layout of text on a page sees 'body text' as being those sections of the main text that are flowed into columns or justified as paragraphs, as distinct from the headings and any pictures that are floated out of the main body. Book design The 'body matter' is the group of pages that contain the body of the text of the book. The front matter comes before it, containing title ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fanqie
''Fanqie'' ( zh, t= 反切, p=fǎnqiè) is a method in traditional Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic character by using two other characters, one with the same initial consonant as the desired syllable and one with the same rest of the syllable (the final). The method was introduced in the 3rd century AD and used in dictionaries and commentaries on the classics until the early 20th century. History Early dictionaries such as the ''Erya'' (3rd century BC) indicated the pronunciation of a character by the ''dúruò'' (讀若, "read as") method, giving another character with the same pronunciation. The introduction of Buddhism to China around the 1st century brought Indian phonetic knowledge, which may have inspired the idea of ''fanqie''. According to the 6th-century scholar Yan Zhitui, ''fanqie'' were first used by Sun Yan (孫炎), of the state of Wei during the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 AD), in his ''Erya Yinyi'' (爾雅音義, "Sound ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren believed that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, based on the more recently recovered preface of the ''Qieyun'', most scholars now believe that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the preceding system of Old Chinese phonology (early 1st millennium BC). The ''fanqie'' method used to indicate pronunciation in these dictionaries, though an improvement on earlier methods, proved awkward in practice. The mid-12th-century ''Yunjing'' and other rime tables incorp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Four Tones (Middle Chinese)
The four tones of Chinese poetry and dialectology () are four traditional tone classes of Chinese words. They play an important role in Chinese poetry and in comparative studies of tonal development in the modern varieties of Chinese, both in traditional Chinese and in Western linguistics. They correspond to the phonology of Middle Chinese, and are named ''even'' or ''level'' ( ''píng''), ''rising'' ( ''shǎng''), ''departing'' or ''going'' ( ''qù''), and ''entering'' or '' checked'' ( ''rù''). (The last three are collectively referred to as ''oblique'' (''zè''), an important concept in poetic tone patterns.) They were reconstructed as mid (˧ or 33), mid rising (˧˥ or 35), high falling (˥˩ or 51), and mid (˧ or 33) with a final stop consonant respectively. Due to historic splits and mergers, none of the modern varieties of Chinese have the exact four tones of Middle Chinese, but they are noted in rhyming dictionaries. Background According to the usual modern analysis, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rime Tables
A rime table or rhyme table () 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 12th-century ''Yunjing'' ("mirror of rhymes") ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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