Phonological System
The rime dictionaries have been intensively studied as important sources on the phonology of medieval Chinese, and the system they reveal has been dubbed Middle Chinese. Since the Qieyun itself was believed lost until the mid-20th century, most of this work was based on the Guangyun.
The books exhaustively list the syllables and give pronunciations, but do not describe the phonology of the language. This was first attempted in the rime tables, the oldest of which date from the Song dynasty, but which may represent a tradition going back to the late Tang dynasty. Though not quite a phonemic analysis, these tables analysed the syllables of the rime books using lists of initials, finals and other features of the syllable. The initials are further analysed in terms of place and manner of articulation, suggesting inspiration from Indian linguistics, at that time the most advanced in the world. However the rime tables were compiled some centuries after the Qieyun, and many of its distinctions would have been obscure. Edwin Pulleyblank treats the rime tables as describing a Late Middle Chinese stage, in contrast to the Early Middle Chinese of the rime dictionaries.
Read more about this topic: Rime Dictionary
Famous quotes containing the word system:
“The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)