Bernhard Karlgren And His Research Of The Ancient Chinese:an Historical Analysis Of Its Methodology And Materials

Bernhard Karlgren’s research of Ancient Chinese phonology is not only the starting point of his entire academic career, but also the very core of all of his academic research. Karlgren built a comprehensive frame for Ancient Chinese phonology, and reconstructed phonetic values for each consonant and vowel. His research is based on the research of traditional Chinese phonology, and comprehensively applies the Western modern phonetics, dialectology and historical linguistics into the study of Ancient Chinese phonology, having made brilliant achievements. Karlgren’s research of Ancient Chinese phonology is of great originality in the history of Chinese research, and has a far-reaching influence over the field of Chinese phonology.In this paper, based on previous studies, we fully discuss the successes and failures of Karlgren’s research of Ancient Chinese phonology. Paper includes the following parts:The first chapter is the Introduction. We here describe the influence of Karlgren’s research of Ancient Chinese phonology on the Chinese phonological academia, review previous research on Karlgren’s research and discuss several controversial issues of Karlgren’s Ancient Chinese reconstruction.The second chapter introduces Karlgren’s life and his academic achievement. Before the description of Karlgren’s life, we first describe the history of Sinology in Western world and especially in Sweden as the background information. About Karlgren’s life we focus mainly on: Karlgren’s family provided him with a good language environment; Lundell, who was Karlgren’s mentor, a great Slavic linguist, phonetician and Swedish dialectologist, gave Karlgren a good academic training of linguistic research; when Karlgren studied Sinology in France, that country was the center and the peak of European Sinology; Karlgren was a gifted linguist, and also an extremely hard-working scholar. At the end of this chapter we introduce how the book Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise was translated into Chinese.The third chapter investigates the value of Karlgren’s Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise from the viewpoint of the evolution of Chinese language research in China. In the field of Chinese phonology, it can be said that from the year of the publication of this book until1949is the "Karlgren’s era". We discuss here mainly Karlgren’s academic background of the historical comparative linguistics, modern phonetics and dialectology, pointing out that Karlgren was the direct descendant of the Neogrammarians. In the field of the research of Chinese dialects, we can say that Karlgren is a pioneer of modern Chinese dialectology, but at the same time, we should point out his survey of Chinese dialects was for the purpose of reconstruction of the Ancient Chinese, differentiating from the later descriptive dialectology. Karlgren investigated, recorded22Chinese dialects, among which the Jin dialects were recorded in detail, and his investigation of the Jin dialects was the first complete one in this area. We can use Karlgren’s dialects’records to research the evolution of some Chinese dialects over the20th century, and we use Nanjing dialect as an example to prove the value of these records. There are also errors in his dialects records, such as the insufficiency of the people being investigated, the inappropriate choice of the survey, paying no attention on the distinguishment between the literary pronunciation and the colloquial pronunciation, and etc.The fourth chapter investigates the value of Karlgren’s Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise from the perspective of the evolution of Chinese language research outside China. In the field of Chinese phonology research outside China, Henri Maspero also made relatively great achievements in the early20th century, but his influence in the academic community was far less than Karlgren. We analyze the reasons beneath this situation. In the field of Chinese dialects’research and investigation made by the Sinologist, we mainly make a comparison between W. A. Grootaers and Karlgren. Karlgren’s survey asked the pronunciation of only the characters, and was to provide materials for the reconstruction of ancient sound; while Grootaers was in favor of a comprehensive description of the dialect, recording the parole, drawing the isoglosses, focusing completely on the synchronic side of the language. The two researches have different points of view and both have their meaning and value. The two researches have different points of view, both have their meaning and value and should be integrated to make complementation to each other.The fifth chapter discusses the three research methods that Karlgren used in his reconstruction of the Ancient Chinese:the method of linking the Fanqie, the method of examining ancient pronunciation and historical comparative method. The first two methods were used to establish the sound class, while the third one was used to study out the sound value. Karlgren’s linking work of the Fanqie is relatively strict, and the characters of labial initials were determined their unrounding or rounding strictly in accordance their latter character in the Fanqie. Before the reconstruction the sound values of the Ancient Chinese, Karlgren used first the method of pronunciation examining to list systematically the phonology framework, and to determine the structural relationship among the sound and the rhyme category. His basis for pronunciation examining was mainly the equiprosody, general phonetics and the investigation of modern dialects. Historical comparative was Karlgren’s fundamental method of studying and reconstructing the Ancient Chinese, but his historical comparative method was different from the classical historical comparison of Indo-European languages. His method was actually an integration of "historical textual research" and "historical comparison", in which the part of textual research came mainly from the achievements of traditional Chinese phonology researches. The main flaws of his historical comparative method are ignoring the impact between the dialects, especially the impact from the common language onto the dialects, considering the Qieyun phonetic system as a homogeneous one, lacking the necessary textual criticism and discrimination on the traditional phonology research.The sixth chapter examines the materials used by Karlgren in the study of Ancient Chinese. Fanqie and rhyme tables were the main materials used by him to establish the phonetic framework of Ancient Chinese and when in discussion, Karlgren separated completely the time of Fanqie and rhyme tables. Fanqie reflected the sounds of "Qieyun" era, and were the main object of his study; while rhyme tables reflected the sounds of the time when they were compiled, and which was several centuries later than the Fanqie. Many researchers believe that Karlgren copied Guangyun’s Fanqie from the Kangxi Dictionary and therefore had many errors. We discussed this issue in this chapter, believing that Karlgren actually referred to Guangyun and the Fanqie he copied out from Kangxi Dictionary had a very low error rate, therefore can be used in establishing the framework of Ancient Chinese. Karlgren made a more cautious use of the rhyme tables, using which to serve as the framework when discussing the category of the initials and finals. Chinese dialects and "the four foreign dialects" were the main material Karlgren used to reconstruct the phonetic values. In spite of the abundant dialects material he used, his paying more attention on the northern dialects than on the southern ones, more attention on the literary pronunciation than on the colloquial pronunciation affected the reliability of his reconstruction. He attached importance to the "foreign dialects" and held conservative attitude towards the Sanskrit-Chinese and other diaphone materials. The main reason behind this difference was that he valued the "foreign dialects" as the Chinese dialects, and using the living languages and dialects to reconstruct the ancient language is the research idea of the historical comparative linguistics.The seventh chapter discusses Karlgren’s viewpoint of considering Qieyun as a single and homogeneous phonetic system. This viewpoint is an important basis of Karlgren’s entire Ancient Chinese’s reconstruction, and if the basis is not solid enough, the whole reconstruction will be in a crisis. We first reviewed the controversy of the Qieyun’s phonological nature in the academia, and then summed up the more conclusive evidence supporting the viewpoint of the synthesized nature of Qieyun phonetic system. At the same time, we attempted to prove the Qieyun’s synthesized nature from the viewpoint of the linguistic economic characteristic. Based on the analysis of an essay from Yanshi Jiaxun and on the summary of the viewpoints of Professor Lu Guoyao and other scholars, we proposed a concept of northern and southern double-line of the developing of Ancient Chinese, and we also conceived the methods of studying these separate northern and southern common language.The final part summarized the full text of this paper and presented three future research projects.