I’ve been reading through Bernhard Karlgren’s “The Reconstruction of Ancient Chinese”. I’m operating entirely off of a digital version, but I can tell by the coloration of the pages that the original must smell fantastic.
Karlgren is speaking on page 4 of how Wu (well, Go-on) was rejected by Henri Maspero as being of little historical importance for reconstruction of ancient chinese phonetics. Karlgren disagrees with Maspero, saying this:
A striking example of the importance [of Wu for this purpose] is the word group placed under rime 江 in Ts’ie yün. Go-on (Wu) is the only one of all the dialects which treats its vocalism differently both from rime 唐 and time 陽, and thus it is just the Wu dialect that gives us the key to the old head vowel in Northern Chinese: 江 kâng.
Not bad. Bolding is mine. Italics are in the original.
Cool. Is this digital version publicly available? I’d love to read it.
It is, and it’s here.
Sweet — thanks for the link. I have a dream of one day scanning and OCR’ing all of the reference books I have around the apartment, but a brief experiment this afternoon with a couple of Mac OCR apps produced decidedly disappointing results for anything mixing Chinese and English. To say nothing of Pinyin.
I’m debating OCRing some things as a trial run, but it’s so IPA heavy in addition to hanzi and some English that I’m pretty sure it’s not even worth trying.
Thanks. I’ve read about half of it so far (I feel a bit of eyestrain at 25%, and yet at 50% it’s wider than my laptop screen). I keep thinking, as Karlgren trashes Maspero again and again, of Jakob Grimm: “Keine unter allen den Wissenschaften ist stolzer, edler, streitsüchtiger als die Philologie, oder gegen Fehler unbarmherziger.” (”Not one among all the sciences is prouder, nobler, or more quarrelsome than philology, or more merciless to error.”)
To be fair to Maspero, though, he proposed as early as 1930 that Old Chinese had known morphology, which was rejected by Karlgren. And Karlgren’s Old Chinese reconstructions contained quite a few mistakes, not only in that aspect. Of course, his work was still ground-breaking, and his reconstruction of Middle Chinese was definitely excellent, but Karlgren didn’t get it all right either. Maspero’s article was mostly forgotten after Karlgren’s criticism of his theory. Most scholars now, however, do think Maspero was right.
Henri Maspero. “Préfixes et dérivation en chinois archaïque”. In: Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, 1930 (vol. XXIII), pp. 313-27.