Bernhard Karlgren
Encyclopedia
Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren was a Swedish
sinologist
and linguist
who pioneered the study of Chinese
historical phonology using modern comparative methods. In the early 1900's, Karlgren conducted large surveys of a number of Chinese dialects and studied historical information on rhyming in ancient Chinese poetry, then used them to create the first ever complete reconstructions
of what is now called Middle Chinese
and Old Chinese
.
, Karlgren showed ability in linguistics from a young age, and was interested in Sweden's dialects and traditional folk stories. He published his first scholarly article at the age of 16 on the dialect of the Swedish province
of Dalarna
. He studied Russian at Uppsala University
under Johan August Lundell
, a Slavicist interested in comparative linguistics
. After graduating in 1909, Karlgren went to St. Petersburg to continue studying. While in St. Petersburg, Karlgren won a grant to study Chinese dialects
, even though he had no background in Chinese.
Karlgren lived in China from 1910 to 1912. He achieved basic fluency and literacy after only a few months of study, and prepared a questionnaire of 3,100 Chinese characters to gather information on Chinese dialects. After his grant money ran out, Karlgren supported himself by teaching French
and, famously, English
, which he had never been taught but had picked up from English-speaking passengers on the ship from Europe to China. He eventually gathered data on 19 different dialects of Mandarin Chinese, as well as Shanghainese
, the Fuzhou dialect
of Min Dong
, and Cantonese
, plus the Vietnamese and Japanese pronunciations of the characters in his questionnaire.
, then in Paris
, before arriving in Uppsala
, where he produced his doctoral dissertation in 1915. (Although his dissertation was written in French, most of his subsequent scholarly works were in English.)
In 1939, Karlgren succeeded the founding director Johan Gunnar Andersson
(1874–1960) as director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities
(Östasiatiska Museet), a post he held until 1959. This public museum was founded in 1926 on Andersson's pioneering discoveries of prehistoric archaeology made in China in the 1920s, and later expanded to cover later periods as well as other parts of Asia. Karlgren had been in close contact with Andersson for many years, and also succeeded Andersson as editor of the museum's journal, the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (BMFEA, 1929-) and continued in this position until the 1970s. Karlgren himself first published many of his own major works in this annual journal, or as books in the monograph series of the museum.
In 1946, Karlgren began a far-reaching attack on the then rather loosely argued historiography of ancient China. Reviewing the literature on China's pre-Han history in his article Legends and Cults in Ancient China, he pointed out that "a common feature to most of these treatises is a curious lack of critical method in the handling of the material". In particular, Karlgren criticised the unselective use of documents from different ages when reconstructing China's ancient history. "In this way very full and detailed accounts have been arrived at—but accounts that are indeed caricatures of scientifically established ones."
to study the Chinese language. He was also the first one to reconstruct the sounds of what is now called Middle Chinese
and Old Chinese
(what he called "Ancient Chinese" and "Archaic Chinese" respectively). Karlgren suggested that at the very earliest stage recoverable, the personal pronouns were declined
for case.
Indeed, Karlgren attempted to unearth Chinese history itself from its linguistic development and diffusion. As he writes in his English adaptation Sound and Symbol in Chinese (1923), Chapter I: "Thus, though Chinese traditions give no hint whatever of an immigration from any foreign country, and though there consequently is no external chronological point d'appui, we are nonetheless able to state, from internal evidence, that the Chinese tradition which places the reign of the emperor Yao in the twenty-fourth century B.C. is correct; that the Chinese even in those remote times were skilled astronomers; that they put down in writing in the Chinese language records of memorable events, and in all probability wrote their accounts soon after the events; in short, that a well-developed Chinese civilization—resting undoubtedly on foundations many centuries old—together with the Chinese language, existed on Chinese soil two thousand years before Christ."
Although important as pioneer efforts in historical Chinese linguistics, Karlgren's original findings have been moved beyond. Today the phonological systems proposed by Karlgren have largely been superseded, as their weaknesses are obvious: "Karlgren saw himself as reconstructing phonetics, not phonology, and paid little attention to phonological structure. As a result, the systems he reconstructed often lack the symmetry and pattern which are in the phonological systems of natural languages." Nevertheless, Karlgren's groundbreaking works laid the foundation of modern Chinese historical linguistics and many of his works are still used as valuable works of reference.
In Swedish he published numerous popular works on Chinese language, culture and history. In the 1940s, he published three novels under the pen name Klas Gullman.
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
sinologist
Sinology
Sinology in general use is the study of China and things related to China, but, especially in the American academic context, refers more strictly to the study of classical language and literature, and the philological approach...
and linguist
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
who pioneered the study of Chinese
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...
historical phonology using modern comparative methods. In the early 1900's, Karlgren conducted large surveys of a number of Chinese dialects and studied historical information on rhyming in ancient Chinese poetry, then used them to create the first ever complete reconstructions
Language reconstruction
Language reconstruction can refer to:*Linguistic reconstruction, establishing the features of a prehistoric language by the methods of historical and comparative linguistics*Linguistic purism in an existing language*Language revival of an extinct language...
of what is now called Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...
and Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
.
Education and first journey to China
A native of JönköpingJönköping
-Notable people:*Lillian Asplund, RMS Titanic survivor*John Bauer, illustrator, painter*Amy Diamond, singer*Agnetha Fältskog, ABBA*Carl Henrik Fredriksson, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Eurozine*Anders Gustafsson, kayaker, Olympian...
, Karlgren showed ability in linguistics from a young age, and was interested in Sweden's dialects and traditional folk stories. He published his first scholarly article at the age of 16 on the dialect of the Swedish province
Provinces of Sweden
The provinces of Sweden, landskap, are historical, geographical and cultural regions. Sweden has 25 provinces and they have no administrative function, but remain historical legacies and the means of cultural identification....
of Dalarna
Dalarna
', English exonym: Dalecarlia, is a historical province or landskap in central Sweden. Another English language form established in literature is the Dales. Places involving the element Dalecarlia exist in the United States....
. He studied Russian at Uppsala University
Uppsala University
Uppsala University is a research university in Uppsala, Sweden, and is the oldest university in Scandinavia, founded in 1477. It consistently ranks among the best universities in Northern Europe in international rankings and is generally considered one of the most prestigious institutions of...
under Johan August Lundell
Johan August Lundell
Johan August Lundell was a Swedish linguist, professor of Slavic languages at Uppsala University. He is known for his work on Swedish dialects and for developing Landsmålsalfabetet, a phonetic alphabet used in dialect research.-Biography:Lundell's parents were Anders Andersson and Carolina Olsdotter...
, a Slavicist interested in comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness....
. After graduating in 1909, Karlgren went to St. Petersburg to continue studying. While in St. Petersburg, Karlgren won a grant to study Chinese dialects
Varieties of Chinese
Chinese comprises many regional language varieties sometimes grouped together as the Chinese dialects, the primary ones being Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. These are not mutually intelligible, and even many of the regional varieties are themselves composed of a number of...
, even though he had no background in Chinese.
Karlgren lived in China from 1910 to 1912. He achieved basic fluency and literacy after only a few months of study, and prepared a questionnaire of 3,100 Chinese characters to gather information on Chinese dialects. After his grant money ran out, Karlgren supported himself by teaching French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
and, famously, English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, which he had never been taught but had picked up from English-speaking passengers on the ship from Europe to China. He eventually gathered data on 19 different dialects of Mandarin Chinese, as well as Shanghainese
Shanghainese
Shanghainese , or the Shanghai language , is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai and the surrounding region. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is largely not mutually intelligible with other Chinese varieties...
, the Fuzhou dialect
Fuzhou dialect
Fuzhou dialect , also known as Foochow dialect, Foochow, Foochowese, Fuzhounese, or Fuzhouhua, is considered the standard dialect of Min Dong, which is a branch of Min Chinese mainly spoken in the eastern part of Fujian Province. Native speakers also call it ' , meaning the language spoken in...
of Min Dong
Min Dong
The Eastern Min language, or Min Dong is the language mainly spoken in the eastern part of Fujian Province in China, in and near Fuzhou and Ningde. Fuzhou is the province's capital and largest city...
, and Cantonese
Cantonese
Cantonese is a dialect spoken primarily in south China.Cantonese may also refer to:* Yue Chinese, the Chinese language that includes Cantonese* Cantonese cuisine, the cuisine of Guangdong province...
, plus the Vietnamese and Japanese pronunciations of the characters in his questionnaire.
Career as sinologist
Karlgren returned to Europe in January 1912, first staying in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, then in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, before arriving in Uppsala
Uppsala
- Economy :Today Uppsala is well established in medical research and recognized for its leading position in biotechnology.*Abbott Medical Optics *GE Healthcare*Pfizer *Phadia, an offshoot of Pharmacia*Fresenius*Q-Med...
, where he produced his doctoral dissertation in 1915. (Although his dissertation was written in French, most of his subsequent scholarly works were in English.)
In 1939, Karlgren succeeded the founding director Johan Gunnar Andersson
Johan Gunnar Andersson
Johan Gunnar Andersson , Swedish archaeologist, paleontologist and geologist, closely associated with the beginnings of Chinese archaeology in the 1920s...
(1874–1960) as director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities
Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities
The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , Stockholm, Sweden. Is a public museum launched by Sweden's Parliament in 1926, with the Swedish archaeologist Johan Gunnar Andersson as founding director. The museum was originally based mainly on Andersson's groundbreaking discoveries in China, during the...
(Östasiatiska Museet), a post he held until 1959. This public museum was founded in 1926 on Andersson's pioneering discoveries of prehistoric archaeology made in China in the 1920s, and later expanded to cover later periods as well as other parts of Asia. Karlgren had been in close contact with Andersson for many years, and also succeeded Andersson as editor of the museum's journal, the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (BMFEA, 1929-) and continued in this position until the 1970s. Karlgren himself first published many of his own major works in this annual journal, or as books in the monograph series of the museum.
In 1946, Karlgren began a far-reaching attack on the then rather loosely argued historiography of ancient China. Reviewing the literature on China's pre-Han history in his article Legends and Cults in Ancient China, he pointed out that "a common feature to most of these treatises is a curious lack of critical method in the handling of the material". In particular, Karlgren criticised the unselective use of documents from different ages when reconstructing China's ancient history. "In this way very full and detailed accounts have been arrived at—but accounts that are indeed caricatures of scientifically established ones."
Legacy
Karlgren was the first scholar to use European-style principles of historical linguisticsHistorical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
to study the Chinese language. He was also the first one to reconstruct the sounds of what is now called Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...
and Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
(what he called "Ancient Chinese" and "Archaic Chinese" respectively). Karlgren suggested that at the very earliest stage recoverable, the personal pronouns were declined
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
for case.
Indeed, Karlgren attempted to unearth Chinese history itself from its linguistic development and diffusion. As he writes in his English adaptation Sound and Symbol in Chinese (1923), Chapter I: "Thus, though Chinese traditions give no hint whatever of an immigration from any foreign country, and though there consequently is no external chronological point d'appui, we are nonetheless able to state, from internal evidence, that the Chinese tradition which places the reign of the emperor Yao in the twenty-fourth century B.C. is correct; that the Chinese even in those remote times were skilled astronomers; that they put down in writing in the Chinese language records of memorable events, and in all probability wrote their accounts soon after the events; in short, that a well-developed Chinese civilization—resting undoubtedly on foundations many centuries old—together with the Chinese language, existed on Chinese soil two thousand years before Christ."
Although important as pioneer efforts in historical Chinese linguistics, Karlgren's original findings have been moved beyond. Today the phonological systems proposed by Karlgren have largely been superseded, as their weaknesses are obvious: "Karlgren saw himself as reconstructing phonetics, not phonology, and paid little attention to phonological structure. As a result, the systems he reconstructed often lack the symmetry and pattern which are in the phonological systems of natural languages." Nevertheless, Karlgren's groundbreaking works laid the foundation of modern Chinese historical linguistics and many of his works are still used as valuable works of reference.
Selected works
- Études sur la phonologie chinoise. 1915-1926.
- Ordet och Pennan i Mittens Rike, 1918, adapted as Sound and Symbol in Chinese, Oxford, 1923. Reprinted 2007: Toronto: Global Language Press, ISBN 978-0-9738-9240-6.
- "The reconstruction of Ancient Chinese", T'oung PaoT'oung PaoT’oung Pao , founded in 1890, is the first international journal of sinology.It was originally named T’oung Pao ou Archives pour servir à l’étude de l’histoire, des langues, la geographie et l’ethnographie de l’Asie Orientale . It is published by the Leiden publisher E. J...
, vol. 21, pp. 1–42, 1922 - Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese 1923.
- "The Authenticity of Ancient Chinese Texts", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1929.
- "The Early History of the Chou Li and Tso Chuan Texts", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1931.
- "Word Families in Chinese", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1933.
- "New Studies on Chinese Bronzes", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1937.
- "Grammata Serica, Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1940.
- "Huai and Han", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1941.
- "Glosses on the Kuo Feng Odes", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1942.
- "Glosses on the Siao Ya Odes", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1944.
- "Glosses on the Ta Ya and Sung Odes", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1946.
- "Legends and Cults in Ancient China", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1946.
- "The Book of Documents", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1950.
- "Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1954.
- Grammata Serica RecensaGrammata Serica RecensaThe Grammata Serica Recensa is a dictionary of Old Chinese published by the Swedish sinologist Bernard Karlgren in 1957.Bernard Karlgren made fundamental contributions to the study of the phonology of Middle and Old Chinese, which he called Ancient and Archaic Chinese respectively.In the course of...
. 1957
In Swedish he published numerous popular works on Chinese language, culture and history. In the 1940s, he published three novels under the pen name Klas Gullman.
Further reading
- Göran MalmqvistGöran MalmqvistProfessor Nils Göran David Malmqvist is a Swedish linguist, member of the Swedish Academy , literary historian, sinologist and translator.-Biography:...
, Bernhard Karlgren: ett forskarporträtt [Bernhard Karlgren: Portrait of a Scholar], Stockholm: Norstedts. 1995. A biography of Karlgren with bibliography of his work. - Hans Bielenstein, "Bernhard Karlgren (1889-1978)", Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 99, No. 3. (Jul. - Sep., 1979), p. 553. A brief obituary. Available through JSTORJSTORJSTOR is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society...
.