Page:Essays on the Chinese Language (1889).djvu/104

90 archaeologist, astronomer, musician, and philologist. In this last capacity he was the author of the 'Yin-hsio-pien-wei" (音學辨微), the "Ssŭ-shêng-ch'ie-yun-piao" (四星切韻表) and the "Ku-yun-piao-chun" (古韻標準). The last is the most important and the only one of the three which is well known at present. It was composed in order to correct and supplement the teachings of Ku Yen-wu, though the latter was evidently Chiang's master. The date of its first publication is 1771, and it was carefully edited by Lo Yu-kao (羅有高). The work is devoted entirely to the discussion of the ancient sounds of certain characters. It gives only thirteen classes of finals, under the three tones p'ing, shang, ch'&uuml;, and eight under the ju tone, and the author regarded this as the proper system for the sounds of words in the old poetry. He held that in the "Shi-ching" the distinction of tones was not observed in the rhymes, a shang word rhyming with a p'ing word if the two approximated in sound. The old rhymes, he thought, represented the speech of the people at the time and in the places of their original composition, and an important matter was to keep old and new pronunciations quite distinct. The forms of characters have changed in the course of time, and so also have the sounds attached to them. The "Ssŭ-shêng-ch'ie-yun-piao," which was published at the same time as the above and by the same editor, is a very short treatise. Chiang left it unrevised and so it has not the full authority of a finished work. It presents a series of tables in which a large number of characters are arranged under the 36 Sanskrit initials and the orthodox finals according to the four tones; the fan-ch'ie spelling is given, and the physical characters of the sounds, as dental, lingual, etc., are indicated.

To the eighteenth century belongs also the "Chung-chou-ch'uan-yun," the complete rhyme-words of China. This work was compiled by Chou Ang (周昻) al. Shao-hsia {少霞), of Soochow, who lived in the second half of the century. It was based on the treatise by Chou Tê-ch'ing noticed above. But the nineteen finals of that work are rearranged and their number