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THE LINGUISTIC AND LITERARY VALUE OF THE MING DYNASTY ‘MOUNTAIN SONGS'
JOHN MCCOY*
Poetry, and the rhyming dictionaries compiled to aid the poet, have presented the linguist with the bulk of his material pertinent to the problem of reconstructing earlier forms of the Chinese language. Of course other aids have been used, such as the evidence of the fan-ch'ieh system of describing character pronunciations by dividing them into initial and final sound segments, the help provided by foreign language data, and the clues from the phonetic elements in the characters. However, the major breakthrough was made with early rhyming dictionaries. Karlgren's great contribution to the history of the Chinese language, his reconstruction of Ancient Chinese, was principally an analysis of the system set up in the Ch'ieh Yün, the Kuang Yün, and other early rhyme books. To this system he assigned phonetic values by positing forms generally consistent with modern dialect pronunciations.
The value of Karlgren's tremendous scholarship cannot be overemphasized, but note should be made that it does not tell us all we will ever want to know about antecedent forms of the present-day dialects of Chinese. Two aspects of his approach lead us to continue our search for corroborating and supplementary materials with which to increase our knowledge about early Chinese.
First, Karlgren's Ancient Chinese must be thought of as a textual reconstruction rather than a linguistic reconstruction, and we ideally want both to fill out our picture. Secondly, for a number of reasons we can assume that the phonology expressed in the formal rhyming dictionaries diverged to some degree from the actual spoken forms of the time.
The difference between a textual reconstruction and a linguistic reconstruction is the difference between the interpretation and
* Dr. McCoy's article "The Dialects of Hong Kong Boat People: Kau Sai" appeared in Volume 5 of the Journal. He is Associate Professor, Division of Modern Languages, Cornell University. This paper is a revised version of one read before the Association of Asian Studies at Philadelphia in March 1968.