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Pai-lang
Bailang or Pai-lang () is the earliest recorded Tibeto-Burman language, known from three short songs, totalling 44 four-syllable lines, recorded in a commentary on the ''Book of the Later Han''. The language is clearly either Lolo–Burmese or closely related, but as of the 1970s it presented "formidable problems of interpretation, which have been only partially solved". Text The ''Book of the Later Han'' (compiled in the 5th century from older sources) relates that the songs were recorded in western Sichuan and a Chinese translation presented to Emperor Ming of Han (58–75 AD). This episode is recorded in the "Treatise on the Southern Barbarians" chapter, which includes the Chinese translation, but not the original songs. The Pai-lang people are described as living to the west of Wenshan, a mountain of the Minshan range in the southern part of modern Mao County. According to the oldest extant commentary on the ''Book of the Later Han'', by Li Xian (651–684), the Chinese tran ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tibeto-Burman Languages
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non- Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people speak Tibeto-Burman languages. The name derives from the most widely spoken of these languages, Burmese and the Tibetic languages, which also have extensive literary traditions, dating from the 12th and 7th centuries respectively. Most of the other languages are spoken by much smaller communities, and many of them have not been described in detail. Though the division of Sino-Tibetan into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches (e.g. Benedict, Matisoff) is widely used, some historical linguists criticize this classification, as the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages lack any shared innovations in phonology or morphology to show that they comprise a clade of the phylogenetic tree. History During the 18th century, several scholars noticed par ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lolo-Burmese Languages
The Lolo-Burmese languages (also Burmic languages) of Burma and Southern China form a coherent branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. Names Until ca. 1950, the endonym ''Lolo'' was written with derogatory characters in Chinese, and for this reason has sometimes been avoided. Shafer (1966–1974) used the term "Burmic" for the Lolo-Burmese languages. The Chinese term is ''Mian–Yi'', after the Chinese name for Burmese and one of several words for Tai, reassigned to replace ''Lolo'' by the Chinese government after 1950. Possible languages The position of Naxi (Moso) within the family is unclear, and it is often left as a third branch besides Loloish and Burmish. Lama (2012) considers it to be a branch of Loloish, while Guillaume Jacques has suggested that it is a Qiangic language. The Pyu language that preceded Burmese in Burma is sometimes linked to the Lolo-Burmese family, but there is no good evidence for any particular classification, and it is best left unclassified withi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Tibeto-Burman Language
Proto-Tibeto-Burman (commonly abbreviated PTB) is the reconstructed ancestor of the Tibeto-Burman languages, that is, the Sino-Tibetan languages, except for Chinese. An initial reconstruction was produced by Paul K. Benedict and since refined by James Matisoff. Several other researchers argue that the Tibeto-Burman languages ''sans'' Chinese do not constitute a monophyletic group within Sino-Tibetan, and therefore that Proto-Tibeto-Burman was the same language as Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Issues Reconstruction is complicated by the immense diversity of the languages, many of which are poorly described, the lack of inflection in most of the languages, and millennia of intense contact with other Sino-Tibetan languages and languages of other families. Only a few subgroups, such as Lolo-Burmese, have been securely reconstructed. Benedict's method, which he dubbed "teleo-reconstruction", was to compare widely separated languages, with a particular emphasis on Classical Tibetan, Jingph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Sino-Tibetan Language
Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Sino-Tibetan language family and the common ancestor of all languages in it, most prominently the Chinese languages, the Tibetan language, Yi, Bai, Burmese, Karen, Tangut, and Naga, although others exist. Paul K. Benedict (1972) placed a particular emphasis on Old Chinese, Classical Tibetan, Jingpho, Written Burmese, Garo, and Mizo in his discussion of Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Proto-Tibeto-Burman may be considered as equivalent to Proto-Sino-Tibetan if Sinitic is considered to be a lower-order subgroup within the Tibeto-Burman group. Features Reconstructed features include prefixes such as the causative ''s-'', the intransitive ''m-'', the miscellaneous ''b-'', ''d-'', ''g-'', and ''r-'', suffixes ''-s'', ''-t,'' and ''-n'', and a set of conditioning factors that resulted in the development of tone in most languages of the family. The existence of such elaborate system of inflectional changes in Proto-Sino ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Li Fang-Kuei
Li Fang-Kuei ( Chinese: 李方桂, Cantonese Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding ar ...: Lei5 Fong1 Gwai3 ej˩˨ fɔŋ˦ gʷaj˧, Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin: Lǐ Fāngguì [li˨ faŋ˦ gʷej˥˩]; 20 August 190221 August 1987) was a Chinese linguistics, linguist known for his studies of the varieties of Chinese, his Linguistic reconstruction, reconstructions of Old Chinese and Proto-Tai, and his documentation of Dene languages, Dene languages in North America. Biography Li Fang-Kuei was born on 20 August 1902 in Canton (Guangzhou) during the final years of the Qing dynasty to a minor scholarly family from Xiyang County, Xiyang, a small town in Shanxi roughly south of Yangquan. Li's father Li Guangyu () received his ''Imperial examination, jinshi'' degree in 1880 and ser ... [...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, 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 dynasty. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty. The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as the '' Analects'', the ''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, Bronze, and Seal scripts. Throughout the Old Chinese period, there was a close correspondence between a character and a monosyllabic and monomorphemic word. Although the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Consonance
In music, consonance and dissonance are categorizations of simultaneous or successive sounds. Within the Western tradition, some listeners associate consonance with sweetness, pleasantness, and acceptability, and dissonance with harshness, unpleasantness, or unacceptability, although there is broad acknowledgement that this depends also on familiarity and musical expertise. The terms form a structural dichotomy in which they define each other by mutual exclusion: a consonance is what is not dissonant, and a dissonance is what is not consonant. However, a finer consideration shows that the distinction forms a gradation, from the most consonant to the most dissonant. In casual discourse, as German composer and music theorist Paul Hindemith stressed, "The two concepts have never been completely explained, and for a thousand years the definitions have varied". The term ''sonance'' has been proposed to encompass or refer indistinctly to the terms ''consonance'' and ''dissonance''. De ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assonance
Assonance is a resemblance in the sounds of words/syllables either between their vowels (e.g., ''meat, bean'') or between their consonants (e.g., ''keep, cape''). However, assonance between consonants is generally called ''consonance'' in American usage. The two types are often combined, as between the words ''six'' and ''switch'', in which the vowels are identical, and the consonants are similar but not completely identical. If there is repetition of the same vowel or some similar vowels in literary work, especially in stressed syllables, this may be termed "vowel harmony" in poetry (though linguists have a different definition of "vowel harmony"). A special case of assonance is rhyme, in which the endings of words (generally beginning with the vowel sound of the last stressed syllable) are identical—as in ''fog'' and ''log'' or ''history'' and ''mystery''. Vocalic assonance is an important element in verse. Assonance occurs more often in verse than in prose; it is used in En ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christopher Beckwith
Christopher I. Beckwith (born October 23, 1945) is an American philologist and distinguished professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He has a B.A. in Chinese from Ohio State University (1968), an M.A. in Tibetan from Indiana University (1974) and a Ph.D. in Inner Asian Studies from Indiana University (1977). Beckwith, a MacArthur Fellow, is a researcher in the field of Central Eurasian studies. He researches the history and cultures of ancient and medieval Central Asia. Concomitantly he specializes in Asian language studies and linguistics, and in the history of Central Eurasia. He teaches Old Tibetan, Central Eurasian languages, and Central Eurasian history and researches the linguistics of Aramaic, Chinese, Japanese, Koguryo, Old Tibetan, Tokharian, Old Turkic, Uzbek, and other languages. His best-known works include ''Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia'' and ''Empires of the Sil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eastern Han Chinese
Eastern Han Chinese or Later Han Chinese is the stage of the Chinese language revealed by poetry and glosses from the Eastern Han period (first two centuries AD). It is considered an intermediate stage between Old Chinese and the Middle Chinese of the 7th-century ''Qieyun'' dictionary. Sources The rhyming practice of Han poets has been studied since the Qing period as an intermediate stage between the ''Shijing'' of the Western Zhou period and Tang poetry. The definitive reference was compiled by Luo Changpei and Zhou Zumo in 1958. This monumental work identifies the rhyme classes of the period, but leaves the phonetic value of each class open. In the Eastern Han period, Confucian scholars were bitterly divided between different versions of the classics: the officially recognized New Texts, and the Old Texts, recently found versions written in a pre-Qin script. To support their challenge to the orthodox position on the classics, Old Text scholars produced many philological st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tongzhi (encyclopedia)
''Tongzhi'' ("Comprehensive Records") is an 1161 Chinese general knowledge encyclopedia written by Zheng Qiao (鄭樵) in the Song dynasty, containing 200 chapters on diverse topics. Contents After the ''Tongdian'', it was the second encyclopedia of the ''Santong'' (The Three Encyclopedias), which were often published together. It is also included second among the ''Shitong'' (The Ten Encyclopedias), compiled in the Qing dynasty. The ''Tongzhi'' became a model for most of the later encyclopedias. ''Tongzhi'' is arranged in 200 volumes (''juan''), plus three volumes of notes. The historical information covers from earliest times to the end of the Tang dynasty The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, t= ), or Tang Empire, was an imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907 AD, with an interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdo .... The contents include basic annals, yearly chronicles, hereditary houses, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Characters
Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as '' kanji''. Chinese characters in South Korea, which are known as '' hanja'', retain significant use in Korean academia to study its documents, history, literature and records. Vietnam once used the ''chữ Hán'' and developed chữ Nôm to write Vietnamese before turning to a romanized alphabet. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. The total number of Chinese characters ever to appear in a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though most are g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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