Rime dictionary


 * This article is about a type of dictionary in ancient China. For the type of Western reference work used in poetry, see rhyming dictionary.

A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary used for writing poetry or other genres requiring rhymes. A rime dictionary focuses on pronunciation and collates characters by rime and tone, instead of by radical. It should not be confused with a rime table, which indicates pronunciation by tabulating syllables according to onset and rime grade as well as rime and tone. In this context, the spelling "rime" is often used instead of the more common "rhyme" in order to distinguish between "rime" in the sense of the rhyming portion of a syllable as opposed to the concept of poetic rhyme.

History
Historical records suggest that the earliest rime dictionary is one called Shenglei (聲類 lit. "sound types") by Li Deng (李登) of the Three Kingdoms period. However, the book did not survive.

The influential Qieyun rime dictionary was published in 601, during the Sui Dynasty, based on five earlier rime dictionaries that are no longer extant. A series of revisions and enlargements followed, with the most important being the Song Dynasty works Guangyun (1008) and Jiyun (1037). These rime dictionaries primarily served the composition of poems (the Imperial Examination in the Tang Dynasty required the examinees to compose poems). Versifiers would rhyme a poem according to the standard rime book (characters within the same yun rhyme with each other), not the sounds of their own dialect or even those of the "mandarin" spoken in their time. For many generations of Chinese versifiers, the standard work to consult is the so-called Pingshuiyun (平水韻) first compiled during the Jin Dynasty, a simplified version of Guangyun which reduced the 206 yun into 106, reflecting the contemporary pronunciations.

Phonology
The Qieyun and its successors all had the same structure. The characters were first divided between the four tones. Because there were more characters of the "level tone" (平聲 píngshēng), they occupied two juan (卷 "fascicles", "scroll" or "volume"), while the other three tones filled one volume each. Each tone was divided into rimes (韻 yùn), traditionally named after the first character of the rime. These rimes were subdivided into homophone groups, with the pronunciation of the group given by a fǎnqiè formula, a pair of characters indicating the initial and final. For example, the pronunciation of 東 "east", the first entry in the Qieyun, was described using the characters 德 tək and 紅 ɣung, indicating tung. The entry for each character gave a brief explanation of its meaning and other lexical information that might be useful in creating a poem.

The rime dictionaries are important sources for historical phonology, in which they are taken as representing a stage called Middle Chinese. Until the discovery of an almost complete early 8th century edition of the Qieyun in 1947, the Guangyun was the most accurate available account of the Qieyun phonology. Fortunately, the expanded dictionaries preserved the phonological structure of the Qieyun almost intact. For example, although the number of rimes increased from 193 in the earlier dictionary to 206 in the Guangyun, the differences are limited to filling in missing rimes corresponding to existing rimes in other tones, or splitting rimes based on the presence or absence of a medial glide.

The fanqie system indicates the phonology only indirectly, as each initial and final is represented by multiple characters. One knows, for example, that since 德 was used as an initial speller for 東 that these words must have had the same initial, and by following chains of such equivalences one can identify all the words with that initial, and similarly for the finals. A careful analysis of this sort was first carried out by the 19th century scholar Chen Li, identifying the initials and finals of the Guangyun, but not their values. A further complication is inconsistency in the treatment of medial glides, which were most commonly indicated by the final speller, but sometimes by the initial speller, or both.

The Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren believed that the Qieyun reflected the speech of the Sui-Tang capital Chang'an, and produced a reconstruction of its sounds by comparing it with Sino-Xenic pronunciations and modern varieties of Chinese. However the preface of the version recovered in 1947 suggests that it represents a compromise between northern and southern reading pronunciations. Most linguists now believe that no single dialect contained all the distinctions recorded, but that each distinction did occur somewhere.