Qieyun

Qieyun
Qieyun excerpt in the Chinese Dictionary Museum, Jincheng, Shanxi
Traditional Chinese	切韻
Simplified Chinese	切韵
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Qièyùn Gwoyeu Romatzyh Chiehyunn Wade–Giles Ch'ieh4-yün4 IPA [tɕʰjê.ŷn] Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization Chit-wahn Jyutping Cit3-wan6 Southern Min Tâi-lô Tshiat-ūn

The Qieyun (Chinese: 切韻) is a Chinese rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui dynasty. The book was a guide to proper reading of classical texts, using the fanqie method to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters. The Qieyun and later redactions, notably the Guangyun, are important documentary sources used in the reconstruction of historical Chinese phonology.

The book was created by Lu Fayan (Lu Fa-yen; 陸法言) in 601. The preface of the Qieyun describes how the plan of the book originated from a discussion with eight of his friends 20 years earlier at his home in Chang'an, the capital of Sui China.

When it grew late and we had been drinking wine for most of the evening, we began discussing the sounds and the rhymes. Modern pronunciations are naturally varied; moreover, those who have written on the sounds and the rhymes have not always been in agreement. [...]

So we discussed the rights and wrongs of the North and the South and the comprehensible and incomprehensible of the ancients and moderns. We wanted to select the precise and discard the extraneous, [...]

None of these scholars was originally from Chang'an; they were native speakers of differing dialects – five northern and three southern. According to Lu, Yan Zhitui (顏之推) and Xiao Gai (蕭該), both men originally from the south, were the most influential in setting up the norms on which the Qieyun was based. However, the dictionary was compiled by Lu alone, consulting several earlier dictionaries, none of which have survived.

When classical Chinese poetry flowered during the Tang dynasty, the Qieyun became the authoritative source for literary pronunciations and it repeatedly underwent revisions and enlargements. It was annotated in 677 by Zhǎngsūn Nèyán (長孫訥言), revised and published in 706 by Wáng Renxu (王仁煦) as the Kanmiu Buque Qieyun (刊謬補缺切韻; "Corrected and supplemented Qieyun"), collated and republished in 751 by Sun Mian (孫愐) as the Tángyùn (唐韻; "Tang rimes"), and eventually incorporated into the still-extant Guangyun and Jiyun rime dictionaries from the Song dynasty. Although most of these Tang dictionary redactions were believed lost, some fragments were discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts and manuscripts discovered at Turpan.