《Beyond Rhyme》.pdfVIP

Beyond Rhyme: The Development of the Digital Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese and Examples of its Use in Textual Analyses from the Western Zhou to the Tang Jeffrey R. Tharsen, University of Chicago Creel-Luce Conference April 23-25, 2010 I. Introduction and Methodology Chinese readers have known for millennia that the sounds of the language(s) of their forebears were different from their current pronounciations of the characters. Sound glosses (shēng xùn 聲訊) in early dictionaries like the Er ya 《爾雅》, Fang yan 《方言》 and Shuowen jiezi 《說文解字》 were the first attempts at transmitting the phonetic values of a graph, complemented in the Western Han 西漢 dynasty by the creation of the dú ruò 讀若 method and in the Eastern Han 東漢 by the f ǎnqìe 反切 system to give the pronunciation of at least the initials and finals of a specific graph. Since then, a wide variety of methods have been developed to help give readers a rough approximation of how the original sounds and rhyme schemes in the text may have functioned, including the use of dú yīn 讀音 and yǔ yīn 語音. Most recently, the application of the Western phonological methodology for reconstruction of the sounds of extinct languages, in particular the concepts of the allofam (word family) and etonym (word root) as evidenced through related Sinitic languages and in concert with Chinese xiéshēng 諧聲series has become instrumental in the analysis of ancient Chinese phonetics. The methodology outlined in this study represents a logical next step in the development of tools which can be employed to help us understand the tapestry of sounds and how these ancient texts may have been read throughout their early history, by allowing any text to be parsed into its possible phonetic readings and then read, using the International Phonetic Alphabet, in what modern phonologi