Rime dictionary

Copy of fragments of the Wang Renxu edition of the Qieyun

I have taken the sounds and the rhymes of the various specialists and the dictionaries of the ancients and moderns, and by arranging what those before me have recorded, I have made up the five volumes of the Qieyun. The splits and analyses are exceedingly fine and the distinctions abundant and profuse.
— Lu Fayan (601), Qieyun, preface translated by S.R. Ramsey[2]

Chinese scholars produced dictionaries to codify reading pronunciations for the correct recitation of the classics and the associated rhyme conventions of regulated verse.[3] The earliest rime dictionary was the Shenglei (lit. "sound types") by Li Deng (李登) of the Three Kingdoms period, containing more than 11,000 characters grouped under the five notes of the ancient Chinese musical scale.[4] The book did not survive, and is known only from descriptions in later works.[5]

Various schools of the Jin dynasty and Northern and Southern dynasties produced their own dictionaries, which differed on many points. The most prestigious standards were those of the northern capital Luoyang and the southern capital Jinling (modern Nanjing).[6] In 601, Lù Fǎyán (陸法言) published his Qieyun, an attempt to merge the distinctions in five earlier dictionaries.[7] According to Lu Fayan's preface, the initial plan of the work was drawn up 20 years earlier in consultation with a group of scholars, three from southern China and five from the north. However the final compilation was by Lu alone, after he had retired from government service.[8]

The Qieyun quickly became popular as the standard of cultivated pronunciation during the Tang dynasty. The dictionaries on which it was based fell out of use, and are no longer extant.[9] Several revisions appeared, of which the most important were:[10][11]

In 1008, during the Song dynasty, a group of scholars commissioned by the emperor produced an expanded revision called the Guangyun. The Jiyun (1037) was a greatly expanded revision of the Guangyun.[10][12] Lu's initial work was primarily a guide to pronunciation, with very brief glosses, but later editions included expanded definitions, making them useful as dictionaries.[11]

Until the mid-20th century, the oldest complete rime dictionaries known were the Guangyun and Jiyun, though extant copies of the latter were marred by numerous transcription errors. Thus all studies of the Qieyun tradition were actually based on the Guangyun. Fragments of earlier revisions of the Qieyun were found early in the century among the Dunhuang manuscripts, in Turfan and in Beijing.[12][13]

When the Qieyun became the national standard in the Tang dynasty, several copyists were engaged in producing manuscripts to meet the great demand for revisions of the work. Particularly prized were copies of Wáng Rénxū's edition, made in the early 9th century, by Wú Cǎiluán (呉彩鸞), a woman famed for her calligraphy.[13] One of these copies was acquired by Emperor Huizong (1100–1126), himself a keen calligrapher. It remained in the palace library until 1926, when part of the library followed the deposed emperor Puyi to Tianjin and then to Changchun, capital of the puppet state of Manchukuo. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, it passed to a book dealer in Changchun, and in 1947 two scholars discovered it in a book market in Liulichang, Beijing.[14] Studies of this almost complete copy have been published by the Chinese linguists Dong Tonghe (1948 and 1952) and Li Rong (1956).[11]

The Qieyun and its successors all had the same structure. The characters were first divided between the four tones. Because there were more characters of the "level tone" (平聲; píngshēng), they occupied two juan (卷 'fascicle', 'scroll' or 'volume'), while the other three tones filled one volume each. The last category or "entering tone" (入聲; rùshēng) consisted of words ending in stops -p, -t or -k, corresponding to words ending in nasals -m, -n and -ng in the other three tones. Today, these final stops are generally preserved in southern varieties of Chinese, but have disappeared in most northern ones, including the standard language.[15]

Each tone was divided into rhyme groups (韻 yùn), traditionally named after the first character of the group, called the 韻目 yùnmù ('rhyme eye').[16] Lu Fayan's edition had 193 rhyme groups, which were expanded to 195 by Zhangsun Nayan and then to 206 by Li Zhou.[17] The following shows the beginning of the first rhyme group of the Guangyun, with first character 東 ('east'):

Each rhyme group was subdivided into homophone groups preceded by a small circle called a 紐 niǔ ('button'). The entry for each character gave a brief explanation of its meaning. At the end of the entry for the first character of a homophone group was a description of its pronunciation, given by a fǎnqiè formula, a pair of characters indicating the initial (聲母 shēngmǔ) and final (韻母 yùnmǔ) respectively. For example, the pronunciation of 東 was described using the characters 德 tok and 紅 huwng indicating t + uwng = tuwng.[18][19][lower-alpha 1] The formula was followed by the character 反 fǎn (in the Qieyun) or the character 切 qiè (in the Guangyun), followed by the number of homophonous characters.[20][21] In the above sample, this formula is followed by the number 十七, indicating that there are 17 entries, including 東, with the same pronunciation.

The order of the rhyme groups within each volume does not seem to follow any rule, except that similar groups were placed together, and corresponding groups in different tones were usually placed in the same order. Where two rhyme groups were similar, there was a tendency to choose exemplary words with the same initial.[22] The table of contents of the Guangyun marks adjacent rhyme groups as tóngyòng (同用), meaning they could rhyme in regulated verse.[23] In the above sample, under the entry for the rhyme group 刪 in the last part the table of contents (on the right page) is the notation "山同用", indicating that this group could rhyme with the following group 山.

The following are the rhyme groups of the Guangyun with their modern names, the finals they include (see next section), and the broad rhyme groups (shè 攝) they were assigned to in the rime tables. A few entries are re-ordered to place corresponding rhyme groups of different tones in the same row, and darker lines separate the tóngyòng groups:

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.[36]

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.[37]

From early in the Tang dynasty, candidates in the imperial examination were required to compose poetry and rhymed prose in conformance with the rhyme categories of the Qieyun. However, the fine distinctions made by the Qieyun were found overly restrictive by poets, and Xu Jingzong and others suggested more relaxed rhyming rules.[66] The Píngshuǐ (平水) system of 106 rhyme groups, first codified during the Jin dynasty, eventually became the prescribed system for the imperial examination. It became the standard for official rhyme books, and was also used as the classification system for such reference works as the Peiwen Yunfu.[67][68]

The Píngshuǐ rhyme groups are the same as the tóngyòng groups of the Guangyun, with a few exceptions:[67]

• The 廢 fèi group is merged with 隊 duì.[69]
• The rising and departing tone groups corresponding to 蒸 zhēng were merged into the 迥 jiǒng and 徑 jìng groups.
• The groups 嚴 yán and 凡 fán, which were tóngyòng in the Guangyun, and in complementary distribution, were split between the two preceding tóngyòng groups.[70]

Yan Zhengqing's Yunhai jingyuan (c. 780) was the first rime dictionary of multisyllabic words rather than single characters.[72] Though no longer extant, it served as the model for a series of encyclopedic dictionaries of literary words and phrases organized by Píngshuǐ rhyme groups, culminating in the Peiwen Yunfu (1711).[73]

Zhongyuan Yinyun rhyme group 侵尋 (-im, -əm), divided into four tones

A side-effect of foreign rule of northern China between the 10th and 14th centuries was a weakening of many of the old traditions. New genres of vernacular literature such as the qu and sanqu poetry appeared, as well as the Zhongyuan Yinyun, created by Zhōu Déqīng (周德清) in 1324 as a guide to the rhyming conventions of qu. The Zhongyuan Yinyun was a radical departure from the rhyme table tradition, with the entries grouped into 19 rhyme classes each identified by a pair of exemplary characters. These rhyme classes combined rhymes from different tones, whose parallelism was implicit in the ordered of the Guangyun rhymes. The rhyme classes are subdivided by tone and then into groups of homophones, with no other indication of pronunciation. The dictionary reflects contemporaneous northern speech, with the even tone divided in upper and lower tones, and the loss of the Middle Chinese final stops.[74] Such syllables, formerly grouped in the entering tone, are distributed between the other tones, but placed after the other syllables with labels such as 入聲作去聲 (rùshēng zuò qùshēng "entering tone makes departing tone").[75]

The early Ming dictionary Yùnluè yìtōng (韻略易通) by Lan Mao was based on the Zhongyuan Yinyun, but arranged the homophone groups according to a fixed order of initials, which were listed in a mnemonic poem in the ci form.[76][77] However, there could still be multiple homophone groups under a given rhyme group, tone and initial, as medial glides were not considered part of the rhyme. Further innovations are found in a rime dictionary from the late 16th century describing the Fuzhou dialect, which is preserved, together with a later redaction, in the Qi Lin Bayin. This work enumerates the finals of the dialect, differentiated by both medial and rhyme, and classifies each homophone group uniquely by final, initial and tone. Both finals and initials are listed in ci poems.[78]

Sea of Characters, level tone folio 53

Tangut was the language of the Western Xia state (1038–1227), centred on the area of modern Gansu. The language had been extinct for four centuries when an extensive corpus of documents in the logographic Tangut script were discovered in the early 20th century. One of the sources used to reconstruct the Tangut language is the Sea of Characters (Chinese: 文海; pinyin: Wénhǎi), a rhyme dictionary written entirely in Tangut, but with the same structure as the Chinese dictionaries. The dictionary consists of one volume each for the Tangut level and rising tones, with a third volume of "mixed category" characters, whose significance is unclear. As with the Chinese dictionaries, each volume is divided into rhymes, and then into homophone groups separated by a small circle. The pronunciation of the first Tangut character in each homophone group is given by a fanqie formula using a pair of Tangut characters. Mikhail Sofronov applied Chen Li's method to these fanqie to construct the system of Tangut initials and finals.[79]

• Kangxi Dictionary

Footnotes

Works cited