Page:Essays on the Chinese Language (1889).djvu/83

Rh finals, the "Yü-pien" being woven into a phonetic dictionary. The characters are distributed according to the five musical notes, the four tones, the Sanskrit initials and a peculiar system of finals. The number of these last is reduced from 206 to 160, by omission of duplicates chiefly. There are 53,525 characters given, being about 27,000 more than were given in the "T'ang-yun."

Another book on the sounds of characters which attained some popularity and is still often quoted is the "Wu-yin-pien-hai" (五音篇海). This treatise, which is generally quoted by its short title "Pien-hai," was compiled by Wang Yü-pi (王與秘), a native of Hou-yang, then subject to the Kin Tartars. It was first published in the year 1184 but it has been often reprinted. The "Yü-pien" formed the basis of the "Pien-hai," but Wang rejected some of the classifiers of that work and made a new arrangement of the characters, introducing the combined phonetic and structural system.

A much more famous book of this century was the "Yun-pu" (韻補), Rhyme Restorer (lit. Repairer). This was the work of Wu Yü (吳棫) al. Wu Ts'ai-lao (才老), a native of the Bohea district in the Province of Fuhkeen. Wu Yü held office for a time under the Kao Tsung Emperor, and he was a distinguished scholar and a careful, methodical writer. In addition to the "Yun-pu" he composed a commentary on one of the classics and the "Mao-shi-pu-yin" (毛詩補音), a treatise in which he gives what he thought were the correct sounds and characters for the "Shi-ching." In compiling the "Yun-pu," also, Wu's chief aim was to restore to the characters in the old classic poetry their original sounds, and to the texts those readings which the rhymes required. The work was at first apparently only an appendix to the "Chi-ku" (集古) of a writer named Hsia (夏), but it attained fame as a separate publication. Wu argued that the political ballads and other poems of early times were at first sung, or chanted, or recited, and that they were not committed to writing but preserved in memory. He held that the minstrels