Fangyan (book)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For the general sense of a regional Chinese dialect, see Varieties of Chinese.
This article is about the dictionary. For the work of philosophy by the same author, see Fayan (book).
Fangyan
Tâi-lô
Hong-giân
Old Chinese
Baxter–Sagart (2014)*paŋ ŋa[r]

The Fangyan

lexicographic work" of its era.[5] His dictionary's preface explains how he spent 27 years amassing and collating the dictionary. Yang collected regionalisms from many sources, particularly the 'light carriage' (輶軒 yóuxuān) surveys made during the Zhou and Qin dynasties, where imperial emissaries were sent into the countryside annually to record folk songs and idioms from across China, reaching as far north as Korea.[5]

Contents

Major Han-era dialect groups as inferred from the Fangyan

The Fangyan originally contained some 9,000 characters in 15 chapters, but two chapters have since been lost.

Definitions typically list regional synonyms. For example, the entry for hu (虎 'tiger') is as follows:

虎：陳魏宋楚之間或謂之李父；江淮南楚之間謂之李耳，或謂之於菟．自關東西或謂之伯都．

Tiger: in the regions of Chen-Wei Song-Chu [Central China], some call it lifu; in the regions of Jiang-Huai Nan-Chu [Southern China], they call it li'er, and some call it wutu. From the Pass, east- and west-ward [Eastern and Western China], some call it also bodu.[6]

Comparative linguists have used dialect data from the Fangyan in reconstructing the pronunciation of Eastern Han Chinese (1st century CE), which is an important diachronic stage between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese. In the above example, Paul Serruys reconstructs 'tiger' as Old Chinese *blxâg. Serruys also applied the techniques of modern dialectology to the distribution of regional words, identifying dialect areas and their relationships.

Terminology

Victor Mair proposed that 方言 be translated as topolect, while dialect should be translated into Chinese as 通言 tōngyán.

Sinitic
language family, if it weren't for the dominant social, historical, and political concept of Chinese as a unitary language. Mandarin, Southwestern Mandarin, the mutually unintelligible varieties of Southwestern Mandarin, and indeed the mutually intelligible dialects within those varieties are all termed "topolects".

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The full title is 輶軒使者絕代語釋別國方言 ('Local expressions of other countries in times immemorial explained by the Light-Carriage Messenger').
  2. ^ Translations include 'regional words',[1] 'regional expressions',[2] 'dictionary of local expressions',[3] and 'regional spoken words'.[4]
    In modern usage, the term fangyan is customarily translated as English dialect, but linguists have proposed direct neologisms of regionalect (John DeFrancis) and topolect (Victor H. Mair).

References

Citations

  1. ISBN 978-9-004-27185-2
    .
  2. ISBN 978-0-700-71199-4
    .
  3. ISBN 978-0-521-23582-2
    .
  4. ISBN 978-3-110-45714-8
    .
  5. ^ a b Creamer 1992, p. 113.
  6. ^ Serruys 1967, p. 256.
  7. ^ Mair, Victor (2016-11-21). "Language vs. script". Language Log. Retrieved 2020-10-12.

Works cited

Further reading

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