Draft:Chinese philology

Philology
Philology
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	小學
Simplified Chinese	小学
Literal meaning	lesser learning
Hanyu Pinyin
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyin	xiǎoxué
Bopomofo	ㄒㄧㄠˇ ㄒㄩㄝˊ
Wade–Giles	hsiao3-hsüeh2
Yue: Cantonese
Jyutping	siu2 hok6
Korean name
Hangul	소학
Revised Romanization
Transcriptions
Revised Romanization	sohak
Japanese name
Kanji	小学
Revised Hepburn
Transcriptions
Revised Hepburn	shōgaku

In traditional Confucian scholarship, philology revolved around study of the language used in the Chinese classics, which were largely composed between the 6th and 3rd centuries BC. By the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD), the Chinese language had evolved considerably from the form in these texts, which is now known as Classical Chinese. As written characters correspond to words rather than sounds, they rarely represent shifts in pronunciations over time in the varieties of Chinese, and eventually required elaborate reconstructions by scholars. Chinese philology focused on elements of the etymology, pronunciation, and graphical form of words in the Classical lexicon. Early scholarly output encompassed Chinese dictionaries like the Erya (c. 3rd century BC), Fangyan (c. 1st century AD), and Shuowen Jiezi (c. 100 AD), which each established concepts central to the autochthonous understanding of the nature of the Chinese language. The field was called 'lesser learning' to contrast it with the 'greater learning' of direct

Origins

It is not clear that Classical Chinese authors used a concept of "words" or "word-meaning" analogous to that in the Western paradigm, and thus there is no obvious notion of parts of speech. There was a common preoccupation during the Classical period with names (‹See Tfd›名 míng); from the Shuowen Jiezi (c. 100 AD) onward, there was also the clear notion of characters (‹See Tfd›字 zì). The first clear indication of Chinese authors articulating a concept of "words" is in the translation of and commentary on Sanskrit Buddhist texts during the 5th century.^[1] While written characters were always discretized and always correspond one-to-one with monosyllabic morphemes, abstract segments of language like ‹See Tfd›辞 cí, ‹See Tfd›言 yán, and ‹See Tfd›文 wén are not consistently defined from text to text, as they are for modern Chinese writers.^[2]

Scope and purpose

Siku Quanshu
Confucian classics

Etymology

訓詁

Erya

Phonology

音韻

Graphology

文字

Shuowen Jiezi

1600–1850: Kaozheng

References

Citations

^ Geaney 2022, p. 5.
^ Geaney 2022, pp. 23–31.

Works cited

Boltz, William G. (1994), The origin and early development of the Chinese writing system, New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, ISBN 978-0-940490-78-9
Branner, David Prager, ed. (2006), The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic Philosophy and Historical-Comparative Phonology, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, ISBN 978-90-272-4785-8
Karen Steffen Chung (史嘉琳) (2013), "East Asian Linguistics", in Allan, Keith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics, Oxford University Press, pp. 209–226, ISBN 978-0-19-958584-7
Geaney, Jane (2022), The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China, Albany: State University of New York Press, ISBN 978-1-4384-8893-6
Handel, Zev (2019), Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script, Brill, ISBN 978-90-04-35222-3
Henderson, John B. (1991), Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-06832-9
Li, Yuming (2015), Language Planning in China, Language Policies and Practices in China, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, ISBN 978-1-61451-558-6
Norman, Jerry (1988), Chinese, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3
O'Neill, Timothy Michael (2016), Ideography and Chinese Language Theory: A History, De Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-110-45923-4
Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (1998), "Qieyun and Yunjing: The Essential Foundation for Chinese Historical Linguistics", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 118 (2): 200, JSTOR 605891
Qiu Xigui (2000) [1988], Chinese Writing, translated by Mattos, Gilbert L.; Norman, Jerry, Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, ISBN 978-1-55729-071-7
Xue, Shiqi (1982), "Chinese Lexicography Past and Present", Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 4 (1): 151–169, doi:10.1353/dic.1982.0009, ISSN 2160-5076
Yong, Heming; Peng, Jing (2008), Chinese Lexicography: A History from 1046 BC to AD 1911, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-156167-2
Zhu, Lei (2017), "Language and Linguistics in Pre-Modern China and East Asia", Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.382, ISBN 978-0-19-938465-5

[FOOTNOTEGeaney20225-1] Geaney 2022, p. 5.

[FOOTNOTEGeaney202223–31-2] Geaney 2022, pp. 23–31.

[1]

[2]