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Fǎnqiè
''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 ...
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Rhyme Dictionary
A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book () is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary that collates characters by tone and rhyme, instead of by radical. The most important rime dictionary tradition began with the '' Qieyun'' (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 '' fǎnqiè'' method, giving a pair of characters indicating the 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 and other properties. The phonological system inferred from these books, o ...
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Ciyuan
The ''Ciyuan'' or ''Tz'u-yüan'' was the first major Chinese dictionary linguistically structured around words (''ci'' ) instead of individual characters (''zi'' ) used to write them. The Commercial Press published the first edition ''Ciyuan'' in 1915, and reissued it in various formats, including a 1931 supplement, and a fully revised 1979–1984 edition. The latest (3rd) edition was issued in 2015 to commemorate the centenary anniversary of its first publication. Contents and significance In Chinese terminology, the ''Ciyuan'' is a ''cidian'' ( "word/phrase dictionary") for spoken or written expressions, as opposed to a ''zidian'' (, lit. "character/logograph dictionary") for written Chinese characters. A character dictionary contains only the definition(s) and pronunciation(s) for a character in isolation, whereas a dictionary of words contains both individual characters and characters in words. Whereas a dictionary of discrete characters would have separate entries for ''zi ...
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Rime Table
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") an ...
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Guangyun
The ''Guangyun'' (''Kuang-yun''; ) is a Chinese rime dictionary that was compiled from 1007 to 1008 under the patronage of Emperor Zhenzong of Song. Its full name was ''Dà Sòng chóngxiū guǎngyùn'' (, literally "Great Song revised and expanded rhymes"). Chen Pengnian (, 961–1017) and Qiu Yong () were the chief editors. The dictionary is a revision and expansion of the influential '' Qieyun'' rime dictionary of 601, and was itself later revised as the ''Jiyun''. ''Pingshui Yun'' system, the standard for poetry rhyming after the Song Dynasty, is also based on ''Guangyun''. Until the discovery of an almost complete early 8th century edition of the ''Qieyun'' in 1947, the ''Guangyun'' was the most accurate available account of the ''Qieyun'' phonology, and was heavily used in early work on the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. It is still used as a major source. The ''Guangyun'' has a similar hierarchical organization to the ''Qieyun'': * The dictionary is split into four ton ...
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Tang Dynasty
The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, t= ), or Tang Empire, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907 AD, with an Zhou dynasty (690–705), interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Historians generally regard the Tang as a high point in Chinese civilization, and a Golden age (metaphor), golden age of cosmopolitan culture. Tang territory, acquired through the military campaigns of its early rulers, rivaled that of the Han dynasty. The House of Li, Lǐ family () founded the dynasty, seizing power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire and inaugurating a period of progress and stability in the first half of the dynasty's rule. The dynasty was formally interrupted during 690–705 when Empress Wu Zetian seized the throne, proclaiming the Zhou dynasty (690–705), Wu Zhou dynasty and becoming the only legitimate Chinese empress regnant. The devast ...
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Gu Yanwu
Gu Yanwu () (July 15, 1613 – February 15, 1682), also known as Gu Tinglin (), was a Chinese philologist, geographer, and famous scholar-official in Qing dynasty. He spent his youth during the Manchu conquest of China in anti-Manchu activities after the Ming dynasty had been overthrown. He never served the Qing dynasty. Instead, he traveled throughout the country and devoted himself to studies. Biography Gu, a native of Jiangsu, was born as Gu Jiang (). Gu began his schooling at the age of 14. In the spring of 1645, Gu was recommended to be the position of ''Bingbu Siwu'' in the royal court at Nanjing. There he proposed many ideas. Unsatisfied with the royal court's organization, Gu resigned and returned to his hometown. In 1655, local officials laid charges against him and threw him into prison. He was released from prison with the help of a friend. Inspired by Chen Di, who had demonstrated that the Old Chinese has its own phonological system, Gu divided the words of Old Chine ...
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Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation (linguistics), intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with ''phoneme''. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Tonal languages are different from Pitch-accent language, pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others. Mechanics Mo ...
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Syllable Onset
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ''ignite'' is made of two syllables: ''ig'' and ''nite''. Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing". A word that consists of a single syllable (like English ''dog'') is called a monosyllable (and is said to be ''monosyllabic''). Similar terms include disyllable (and ''disyllabic''; also ''bis ...
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Qieyun Dong Entry Fanqie
The ''Qieyun'' () is a Chinese rhyme dictionary, published in 601 during the Sui dynasty. The book was a guide to proper reading of classical texts, using the ''fanqie'' method to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters. The ''Qieyun'' and later redactions, notably the ''Guangyun'', are important documentary sources used in the reconstruction of historical Chinese phonology. History The book was created by Lu Fayan (Lu Fa-yen; ) in 601. The preface of the ''Qieyun'' describes how the plan of the book originated from a discussion with eight of his friends 20 years earlier at his home in Chang'an, the capital of Sui China. None of these scholars was originally from Chang'an; they were native speakers of differing dialects – five northern and three southern. According to Lu, Yan Zhitui (顏之推) and Xiao Gai (), both men originally from the south, were the most influential in setting up the norms on which the ''Qieyun'' was based. However, the dictionary was compil ...
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Manchu Script
The Manchu alphabet ( mnc, m=, v=manju hergen, a=manju hergen) is the alphabet used to write the now nearly-extinct Manchu language. A similar script is used today by the Xibe people, who speak a language considered either as a dialect of Manchu or a closely related, mutually intelligible language. It is written vertically from top to bottom, with columns proceeding from left to right. History ''Tongki fuka akū hergen'' According to the ' (; ), in 1599 the Jurchen leader Nurhaci decided to convert the Mongolian alphabet to make it suitable for the Manchu people. He decried the fact that while illiterate Han Chinese and Mongolians could understand their respective languages when read aloud, that was not the case for the Manchus, whose documents were recorded by Mongolian scribes. Overriding the objections of two advisors named Erdeni and G'ag'ai, he is credited with adapting the Mongolian script to Manchu. The resulting script was known as () — the "script without dot ...
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Transcription Into Chinese Characters
Transcription into Chinese characters is the use of traditional or simplified Chinese characters to ''phonetically'' transcribe the sound of terms and names of foreign words to the Chinese language. Transcription is distinct from translation into Chinese whereby the ''meaning'' of a foreign word is communicated in Chinese. Since, in mainland China and often in Taiwan, Hanyu Pinyin is now used to transcribe Chinese into a modified Latin alphabet and since English classes are now standard in most secondary schools, it is increasingly common to see foreign names and terms left in their original form in Chinese texts. However, for mass media and marketing within China and for non-European languages, particularly those of the Chinese minorities, transcription into characters remains very common. Despite the importance of Cantonese and other southern coastal varieties of Chinese to foreign contact during the 19th century (as seen, for instance, in the number of Cantonese loanwords i ...
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