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Bailan (Lucía Méndez Album)
Bailang or Pai-lang ( zh, c=白狼, p=Bái láng, l=white wolf) 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 Bailang 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'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after India, representing 17.4% of the world population. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and Borders of China, borders fourteen countries by land across an area of nearly , making it the list of countries and dependencies by area, third-largest country by land area. The country is divided into 33 Province-level divisions of China, province-level divisions: 22 provinces of China, provinces, 5 autonomous regions of China, autonomous regions, 4 direct-administered municipalities of China, municipalities, and 2 semi-autonomous special administrative regions. Beijing is the country's capital, while Shanghai is List of cities in China by population, its most populous city by urban area and largest financial center. Considered one of six ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tongzhi (encyclopedia)
The ''Tongzhi'' ('Comprehensive records') is a Chinese general knowledge encyclopedia completed in 1161 by Zheng Qiao (), a scholar during the Song dynasty. The work contains 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, c=唐朝), or the Tang Empire, was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907, with an Wu Zhou, interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed .... The contents include basic annals, yearly ... [...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, Jing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Sino-Tibetan Language
Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) is the linguistic reconstruction of the Sino-Tibetan proto-language and the common ancestor of all languages in it, including the Sinitic languages, the Tibetic languages, Yi, Bai, Burmese, Karen, Tangut, and Naga. Paul K. Benedict (1972) placed a particular emphasis on Old Chinese, Classical Tibetan, Jingpho language, Jingpho, Written Burmese, Garo language, Garo, and Mizo language, Mizo in his discussion of Proto-Sino-Tibetan. While Proto-Sino-Tibetan is commonly considered to have two direct descendants, Old Chinese, Proto-Sinitic and Proto-Tibeto-Burman, in recent years several scholars have argued that this was not well-substantiated, and have taken to calling the group "Trans-Himalayan". In this case, Proto-Tibeto-Burman may be considered as equivalent to Proto-Sino-Tibetan if Sinitic is indeed not the first branch to split from Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Features Reconstructed features include prefixes such as the causative ''s-'', the intransitive ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Li Fang-Kuei
Li Fang-Kuei (; 20 August 190221 August 1987) was a Chinese linguist known for his studies of the varieties of Chinese, his reconstructions of Old Chinese and Proto-Tai, and his documentation of Dene languages in North America. Biography Li Fang-Kuei was born on 20 August 1902 in Guangzhou during the final years of the Qing dynasty to a minor scholarly family from Xiyang, a small town in Shanxi roughly south of Yangquan. Li's father Li Guangyu () received his imperial examination degree in 1880, and served in minor official posts in the late 19th to early 20th century. Li was one of the first Chinese people to study linguistics outside China. Originally a student of medicine, he switched to linguistics when he went to the United States in 1924. He earned a BA in linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1926 after only two years of study. He then did graduate study under Edward Sapir at the University of Chicago, where he was Sapir's first graduate student. From Sapir he ... [...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] |
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 theory, 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 ''d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assonance
Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar phonemes in words or syllables that occur close together, either in terms of their vowel phonemes (e.g., ''lean green meat'') or their consonant phonemes (e.g., ''Kip keeps capes ''). However, in American usage, ''assonance'' exclusively refers to this phenomenon when affecting vowels, whereas, when affecting consonants, it is generally called ''consonance''. The two types are often combined, as between the words ''six'' and ''switch'', which contain the same vowel and similar consonants. 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''. Vocal ... [...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 Bloomington, Indiana. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Chinese from Ohio State University (1968), a Master of Arts in Tibetan from Indiana University Bloomington (1974) and a Doctor of Philosophy 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 Bud ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eastern Han Chinese
Eastern Han Chinese (alternatively Later Han Chinese or Late Old Chinese) is the stage of the Chinese language Chinese ( or ) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and List of ethnic groups in China, many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Approximately 1.39& ... attested in poetry and glosses from the Eastern Han period (1st–3rd centuries AD). It is considered an intermediate stage between Old Chinese and the Middle Chinese of the 7th-century ''Qieyun'' rime dictionary. Sources The rhyming practice of Han poets has been studied since the Qing period as an intermediate stage between the ''Classic of Poetry'' of the Western Zhou period and Tang poetry. The definitive reference was compiled by Luo Changpei and Zhou Zumo in 1958. This work identifies the rhyme classes of the period, but leaves the phonetic value of each class open. During the Eastern Han, Confucian scholars w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Characters
Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represent the only one that has remained in continuous use. Over a documented history spanning more than three millennia, the function, style, and means of writing characters have changed greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing all of the frequently used vocabulary in a language requires roughly 2000–3000 characters; , nearly have been identified and included in ''The Unicode Standard''. Characters are created according to several principles, where aspects of shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning. The first attested characters are oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century&n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sichuan
Sichuan is a province in Southwestern China, occupying the Sichuan Basin and Tibetan Plateau—between the Jinsha River to the west, the Daba Mountains to the north, and the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau to the south. Its capital city is Chengdu, and its population stands at 83 million. Sichuan neighbors Qinghai and Gansu to the north, Shaanxi and Chongqing to the east, Guizhou and Yunnan to the south, and Tibet to the west. During antiquity, Sichuan was home to the kingdoms of Ba and Shu until their incorporation by the Qin. During the Three Kingdoms era (220–280), Liu Bei's state of Shu was based in Sichuan. The area was devastated in the 17th century by Zhang Xianzhong's rebellion and the area's subsequent Manchu conquest, but recovered to become one of China's most productive areas by the 19th century. During World War II, Chongqing served as the temporary capital of the Republic of China, and was heavily bombed. It was one of the last mainland areas captured ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
