A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book (simplified Chinese: 韵书; traditional Chinese: 韻書; pinyin: yùnshū) 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 aimed to reconcile the literary reading traditions and poetic practice 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 also record the pronunciation of characters by the fǎnqiè method, using a pair of characters to indicate the onset and remainder of the syllable respectively. In contrast, 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, often interpreted using the rime tables, is known as Middle Chinese, and has been the key datum for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. It incorporates most of the distinctions found in modern varieties of Chinese, as well as some that are no longer distinguished. It has also been used together with other evidence in the reconstruction of Old Chinese (1st millennium BC).
Some scholars use the French spelling "rime", as used by the Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren, for the categories described in these works, to distinguish them from the concept of poetic rhyme.
Read more about Rime Dictionary: History, Structure, Phonological System
Famous quotes containing the words rime and/or dictionary:
“Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)
“If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be “To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one’s own writings in translation.””
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)