Eastern Han Chinese
| Eastern Han Chinese | |
|---|---|
| Later Han Chinese | |
| Native to | China |
| Era | Eastern Han dynasty |
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Sino-Tibetan
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| Clerical script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
Provinces in the Eastern Han period
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Eastern Han Chinese or Later Han Chinese is the stage of the Chinese language revealed by poetry and glosses from the Eastern Han period (first two centuries AD). It is considered an intermediate stage between Old Chinese and the Middle Chinese of the 7th-century Qieyun dictionary.
The rhyming practice of Han poets has been studied since the Qing period as an intermediate stage between the Shijing of the Western Zhou period and Tang poetry. The definitive reference was compiled by Luo Changpei and Zhou Zumo in 1958. This monumental work identifies the rhyme classes of the period, but leaves the phonetic value of each class open.
In the Eastern Han period, Confucian scholars were bitterly divided between different versions of the classics: the officially recognized New Texts, and the Old Texts, recently found versions written in a pre-Qin script. To support their challenge to the orthodox position on the classics, Old Text scholars produced many philological studies. These include Xu Shen's Shuowen Jiezi, a study of the history and structure of Chinese characters, the Shiming, a dictionary of classical terms, and several others. Many of these works contain remarks of various types on the pronunciation of various words.
Buddhism also expanded greatly in China during the Eastern Han period. Many Buddhist texts translated into Chinese at the time include transcriptions in Chinese characters of Sanskrit and Prakrit names and terms. These were first systematically mined for evidence of the evolution of Chinese phonology by Edwin Pulleyblank.
The Shiming glosses were collected and studied by Nicholas Bodman.Weldon South Coblin collected all the remaining glosses and transcriptions, and used them in an attempt to reconstruct an intermediate stage between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese, both represented by the reconstructions of Li Fang-Kuei. Axel Schuessler included reconstructed pronunciations (under the name Later Han Chinese) in his dictionary of Old Chinese.
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