Rime dictionary
Encyclopedia
Chinese dictionary
Chinese dictionaries date back over two millennia to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, which is a significantly longer lexicographical history than any other language. There are hundreds of dictionaries for Chinese, and this article will introduce some of the most important...
used for writing poetry or other genres requiring rhyme
Rhyme
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...
s. A rime dictionary focuses on pronunciation and collates character
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
s by rime
Syllable rime
In the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. It is the part of the syllable used in poetic rhyme, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech.The rime is usually the...
and tone
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
, instead of by radical
Radical (Chinese character)
A Chinese radical is a component of a Chinese character. The term may variously refer to the original semantic element of a character, or to any semantic element, or, loosely, to any element whatever its origin or purpose...
. It should not be confused with a rime table
Rime table
A rime table or rhyme table is a syllable chart of the Chinese language, a significant advance on the fǎnqiè analysis used in earlier rime dictionaries...
, which indicates pronunciation by tabulating syllable
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
s according to onset and rime grade as well as rime and tone. In this context, the spelling "rime" is often used instead of the more common "rhyme" in order to distinguish between "rime" in the sense of the rhyming portion of a syllable as opposed to the concept of poetic rhyme.
History
Historical records suggest that the earliest rime dictionary is one called Shenglei (聲類 lit. "sound types") by Li Deng (李登) of the Three KingdomsThree Kingdoms
The Three Kingdoms period was a period in Chinese history, part of an era of disunity called the "Six Dynasties" following immediately the loss of de facto power of the Han Dynasty rulers. In a strict academic sense it refers to the period between the foundation of the state of Wei in 220 and the...
period. However, the book did not survive.
The influential Qieyun
Qieyun
The Qieyun is a Chinese rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui Dynasty. The title Qieyun literally means "cutting rimes" referring to the traditional Chinese fănqiè system of spelling, and is thus translatable as "Spelling Rimes."Lù Făyán was the chief editor...
rime dictionary was published in 601, during the Sui Dynasty
Sui Dynasty
The Sui Dynasty was a powerful, but short-lived Imperial Chinese dynasty. Preceded by the Southern and Northern Dynasties, it ended nearly four centuries of division between rival regimes. It was followed by the Tang Dynasty....
, based on five earlier rime dictionaries that are no longer extant.
A series of revisions and enlargements followed, with the most important being the Song Dynasty
Song Dynasty
The Song Dynasty was a ruling dynasty in China between 960 and 1279; it succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, and was followed by the Yuan Dynasty. It was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or paper money, and the first Chinese government to establish a...
works Guangyun
Guangyun
The Guangyun is a Chinese rime dictionary that was compiled from 1007 to 1008 under the auspices of Emperor Zhenzong of Song. Chen Pengnian and Qiu Yong were the chief editors....
(1008) and Jiyun
Jiyun
The Jiyun is a Chinese rime dictionary published in 1037 during the Song Dynasty. The chief editor Ding Du and others expanded and revised the Guangyun. It is possible, according to Teng and Biggerstaff , that Sima Guang completed the text in 1067...
(1037).
These rime dictionaries primarily served the composition of poem
Chinese poetry
Chinese poetry is poetry written, spoken, or chanted in the Chinese language, which includes various versions of Chinese language, including Classical Chinese, Standard Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Yue Chinese, as well as many other historical and vernacular varieties of the Chinese language...
s (the Imperial Examination
Imperial examination
The Imperial examination was an examination system in Imperial China designed to select the best administrative officials for the state's bureaucracy. This system had a huge influence on both society and culture in Imperial China and was directly responsible for the creation of a class of...
in the Tang Dynasty
Tang Dynasty
The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...
required the examinees to compose poems). Versifiers would rhyme
Rhyme
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...
a poem according to the standard rime book (characters within the same yun rhyme with each other), not the sounds of their own dialect or even those of the "mandarin" spoken in their time. For many generations of Chinese versifiers, the standard work to consult is the so-called Pingshuiyun (平水韻) first compiled during the Jin Dynasty
Jin Dynasty, 1115–1234
The Jīn Dynasty ; Khitan language: Nik, Niku; ; 1115–1234), also known as the Jurchen Dynasty, was founded by the Wanyan clan of the Jurchens, the ancestors of the Manchus who established the Qing Dynasty some 500 years later...
, a simplified version of Guangyun which reduced the 206 yun into 106, reflecting the contemporary pronunciations.
Phonology
The Qieyun and its successors all had the same structure.The characters were first divided between the four tones
Four tones
The four tones of Chinese phonology are four traditional tone-classes of words derived from the four phonemic tones of Middle Chinese. They are even level , rising , going departing , and entering checked .-Names:In Middle Chinese, each of the tone names carries the tone it identifies: 平 even ,...
.
Because there were more characters of the "level tone" (平聲 píngshēng), they occupied two juan (卷 "fascicles", "scroll" or "volume"), while the other three tones filled one volume each.
Each tone was divided into rimes (韻 yùn), traditionally named after the first character of the rime.
These rimes were subdivided into homophone
Homophone
A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose and rose , or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms...
groups, with the pronunciation of the group given by a fǎnqiè
Fanqiè
In Chinese phonology, fanqie is a method to indicate the pronunciation of a character by using two other characters.-The Origin:...
formula, a pair of characters indicating the initial and final.
For example, the pronunciation of 東 "east", the first entry in the Qieyun, was described using the characters 德 tək and 紅 ɣung, indicating tung.
The entry for each character gave a brief explanation of its meaning and other lexical information that might be useful in creating a poem.
The rime dictionaries are important sources for historical phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, in which they are taken as representing a stage 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...
.
Until the discovery of an almost complete early 8th century edition of the Qieyun in 1947, the Guangyun was the most accurate available account of the Qieyun phonology.
Fortunately, the expanded dictionaries preserved the phonological structure of the Qieyun almost intact.
For example, although the number of rimes increased from 193 in the earlier dictionary to 206 in the Guangyun, the differences are limited to filling in missing rimes corresponding to existing rimes in other tones, or splitting rimes based on the presence or absence of a medial glide.
The fanqie system indicates the phonology only indirectly, as each initial and final is represented by multiple characters.
One knows, for example, that since 德 was used as an initial speller for 東 that these words must have had the same initial, and by following chains of such equivalences one can identify all the words with that initial, and similarly for the finals.
A careful analysis of this sort was first carried out by the 19th century scholar Chen Li, identifying the initials and finals of the Guangyun, but not their values.
A further complication is inconsistency in the treatment of medial glides, which were most commonly indicated by the final speller, but sometimes by the initial speller, or both.
The Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren believed that the Qieyun reflected the speech of the Sui-Tang capital Chang'an
Chang'an
Chang'an is an ancient capital of more than ten dynasties in Chinese history, today known as Xi'an. Chang'an literally means "Perpetual Peace" in Classical Chinese. During the short-lived Xin Dynasty, the city was renamed "Constant Peace" ; yet after its fall in AD 23, the old name was restored...
, and produced a reconstruction of its sounds by comparing it with Sino-Xenic pronunciations and modern varieties of Chinese
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...
.
However the preface of the version recovered in 1947 suggests that it represents a compromise between northern and southern reading pronunciations.
Most linguists now believe that no single dialect contained all the distinctions recorded, but that each distinction did occur somewhere.
See also
- Peiwen YunfuPeiwen YunfuThe Peiwen Yunfu is a 1711 Chinese rime dictionary of literary allusions and poetic dictions. Collated by tone and rime, the dictionary serves the composition of poetry....
- Kangxi DictionaryKangxi dictionaryThe Kangxi Dictionary was the standard Chinese dictionary during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Kangxi Emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty ordered its compilation in 1710. The creator innovated greatly by reusing and confirming the new Zihui system of 596 radicals, since then known as 596 Kangxi...
- Qī Lín BāyīnQi Lín BayinQī Lín Bāyīn , sometimes translated as Book of Eight Sounds or Book of Eight Tones in English, is a Chinese rime book of approximately ten thousand characters based on the earlier form of the Fuzhou dialect...