A Handbook of Eastern Han Sound Glosses

During the past eighty years the study of Chinese historical phonology has focused on the Middle Chinese (ca. A.D. 600) and Old Chinese (ca. 1000 B.C.) periods. Work on the intervening span of over 1000 years has been less intense, due in great part to the paucity and relative inaccessibility of relevant data. Within this long interval the first and second centuries A.D., corresponding to the ascendancy of the Eastern Han dynasty, promise to be important for future research. Linguistically this seems to have been a transition period between the Old and Middle Chinese sound systems. Intellectually it was a time of intense scholarly activity resulting in the compilation of several major lexicographical works and many commentaries on earlier texts. Among the philological devices used by the Eastern Han scholars were various types of sound glosses and annotations. These seem to have been based on the pronunciations of those who formulated them and therefore reflect the sound systems of a number of Eastern Han dialects. The object of this handbook is to collect and make available to students of Chinese historical linguistics a corpus of heretofore widely scattered Eastern Han sound gloss data. A further source of information on Eastern Han phonology is the sizable body of identifiable transcriptional forms found in Han Buddhist texts. Though these are not sound glosses per se, they are of such importance for the study of Eastern Han phonology that it seemed justifiable to include them in a reference source of this type.