Rime Table - History

History

The Qieyun, produced by Lù Fǎyán (陸法言) in 601, was a rime dictionary, serving as a guide to the recitation of literary texts and an aid in the composition of verse. It quickly became popular during the Tang dynasty, leading to a series of revised and expanded editions, the most important of which was the Guangyun (1008). In these dictionaries, characters were grouped first by the four tones, and then into rhyme groups. Each rhyme group was subdivided into groups of homophonous characters, with the pronunciation of each given by a fanqie formula, a pair of familiar characters indicating the sounds of the initial and final parts of a syllable respectively. The dictionaries typically used several characters for each initial or final.

The fanqie method of indicating pronunciation made the dictionaries awkward to use. The děngyùnxué (等韻學 "study of classified rhymes") was a more sophisticated analysis of the Qieyun pronunciations, initially developed by Chinese Buddhist monks who were studying Indian linguistics. A tantalizing glimpse of this tradition is offered by fragments from Dunhuang. A fragment held by the British Library (Or.8210/S.512) simply lists 30 initial consonants. Another document includes three fragments attributed to a monk called Shǒuwēn (守温), who may have lived as early as the 9th century. These fragments do not contain tables, but describe the phonological analysis that underlies them.

The oldest known rhyme tables are a version of the Yunjing published with prefaces dated 1161 and 1203, and the Qiyin lüe, which was included in the 1161 encyclopedia Tōngzhì (通志). The two are very similar, and are believed to be derived from a single version pre-dating the Song dynasty. The tables were accompanied by a body of teachings known as mēnfǎ (門法 "school precepts"), including rules for placing fanqie spellings that did not conform to the system within the tables.

Later rhyme tables were more elaborate. The Sìshēng děngzǐ (四聲等子) was probably created during the Northern Song, and explicitly introduced broad rhyme classes (shè 攝), which were previously implicit in the ordering of the tables. The tables are also restructured with separate columns for each of the 36 initials. The preface of the Qièyùn zhĭzhǎngtú (切韻指掌圖) is dated 1203, in the Southern Song. The Jīng shǐ zhèng yīn Qièyùn zhǐnán (經史正音切韻指南), produced by Liú Jiàn (劉鑑) in 1336, was the basis for one of the two sets of rime tables at the front of the Kangxi dictionary.

The Yunjing was lost in China for several centuries. The Qieyun zhizhangtu, incorrectly attributed to the 11th century scholar Sima Guang, was believed to be the oldest of the rime tables, and was used in the earliest reconstruction efforts. However in the 1880s several versions of the Yunjing were discovered in Japan. Comparison with the Qiyin lüe showed that they were based on a common model, of which the other rime tables were later refinements. All recent reconstruction work has been based on the Yunjing. The Fù Sòng Yǒnglù (覆宋永禄) edition of 1564 is considered the most reliable, and is the basis of all reproductions in circulation.