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Qieyun
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 comp ...
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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 in ...
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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 book ...
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Qieyun Dong Entry
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 comp ...
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Historical Chinese Phonology
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic spellings were used. Chinese is documented over a long period of time, with the earliest oracle bone writings dated to c. 1250 BC. However, since the writing is mostly with logographic characters, which do not directly specify the phonology of the language, reconstruction is in general quite difficult, and depends to a large extent on ancillary sources that more directly document the language's phonology. On the basis of these sources, historical Chinese is divided into the following basic periods: *Old Chinese, broadly from about 1250 BC to 25 AD, when the Han dynasty came back to power af ...
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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 ...
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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, "So ...
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Kingdom Of Qocho
Qocho (), also known as Idiqut, ("holy wealth"; "glory"; "lord of fortune") was a Uyghur kingdom created in 843, with strong Chinese Buddhist and Tocharian influences. It was founded by Uyghur refugees fleeing the destruction of the Uyghur Khaganate after being driven out by the Yenisei Kirghiz. They made their summer capital in Qocho (also called ''Gaochang'' or ''Qara-Khoja'', near modern Turpan) and winter capital in Beshbalik (modern Jimsar County, also known as Tingzhou). Its population is referred to as the "Xizhou Uyghurs" after the old Tang Chinese name for Gaochang, the Qocho Uyghurs after their capital, the Kucha Uyghurs after another city they controlled, or the Arslan (lion) Uyghurs after their king's title. Timeline In 843 a group of Uyghurs migrated southward under the leadership of Pangtele and occupied Karasahr and Kucha, taking them from the Tibetan Empire. In 856, this group of Uyghurs received royal recognition from the Tang dynasty. At this time their ...
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Tangyun - Chinese Dictionary Museum
The ''Tangyun'' () is a Chinese rime dictionary, published in 732 CE during the Tang dynasty, by Sun Mian (孫愐), which is a revised version of '' Qieyun'', a guide for Chinese pronunciation by using the fanqie method. The original has lost. According to ''Shigutang Shuhua Huikao'' (式古堂書畫匯考) by Bian Yongyu (卞永譽), Tangyun has 5 volumes, 195 rimes totally. The statistics is the same as from ''Kanmiu Buque Qieyun'' (刊謬補缺切韻) by Wang Renxu (王仁昫), which has respectively one more rimes in Shangshen (上聲) and Qusheng (去聲) than Qieyun. The Buddhist Uyghur Kingdom of Qocho used the Qianziwen (the Thousand Character Classic), Qieyun and it was written that "In Qocho city were more than fifty monasteries, all titles of which are granted by the emperors of the Tang dynasty, which keep many Buddhist texts such as the '' Tripitaka'', ''Tangyun'', ''Yupian The ''Yupian'' (; "Jade Chapters") is a c. 543 Chinese dictionary edited by Gu Yewang ...
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Chinese Language
Chinese (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered separate languages in a family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (with about 800 million speakers, or 66%), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e ...
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Kanmiu Buque Qieyun
The ''Kanmiu Buque Qieyun'' (刊謬補缺切韻) by Wang Renxu (王仁昫), which was published in 706, is the oldest extant Chinese rime dictionary. For many centuries believed lost, a copy was found at the imperial palace in Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ... in 1947. Lóng 1968 published an eye copy with annotations. Zhou 1983: 434-527 includes a facsimile of the original, which is not very legible. There are three versions of ''Kānmiù Bǔquē Qièyùn'', which are typically distinguished by numerals as and they are distinguished by numbers 王一, 王二, and 王三. The first version, 王一, is known only from a Dunhuang fragment (P. 2011). The second, 王二 is also called Xiàngbáběn 项跋本, because there is a postscript by Xiàng Yuánbi� ...
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Li Rong (linguist)
Li Rong (4 February 1920 – 31 December 2002) was a Chinese linguist known for his work on Chinese dialectology. He was director of the Institute of Linguistics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences from 1982 to 1985, and editor of the ''Language Atlas of China'' and the ''Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects''. Li Rong was born in Wenling county, Zhejiang. In 1939 he was admitted to the Southwest Associated University in Kunming, studying Chinese literature. In 1943, he went on to postgraduate study at the Language Institute of Peking University, then based in Kunming. His master's thesis, a study of the system of ''fanqie'' pronunciation guides in the '' Qieyun'', a 7th-century rime dictionary, was published in 1952. In this work, he demonstrated that the mysterious "divisions" of the later rime tables reflected distributional patterns in the ''Qieyun''. Li Rong founded the Chinese dialectology journal ''Fangyan'' in 1979, and served as its editor. He led a tea ...
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Dunhuang Manuscripts
Dunhuang manuscripts refer to a wide variety of religious and secular documents (mostly manuscripts, but also including some woodblock-printed texts) in Chinese and other languages that were discovered at the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, during the 20th century. The majority of the surviving texts come from a large cache of documents produced between the late 4th and early 11th centuries which had been sealed in the so-called ' Library Cave' (Cave 17) at some point in the early 11th century. The Library Cave was discovered by a Daoist monk called Wang Yuanlu in 1900, and much of the contents of the cave were subsequently sold to European explorers such as Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot. In addition to the Library Cave, manuscripts and printed texts have also been discovered in several other caves at the site. Notably, Pelliot retrieved a large number of documents from Caves 464 and 465 in the northern section of the Mogao Caves. These documents mostly date to the Yuan dynasty ( ...
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