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Concept
Rime table
Summary
A rime table or rhyme table () is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the Qieyun (601) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties. The method gave a significantly more precise and systematic account of the sounds of those dictionaries than the previously used analysis, but many of its details remain obscure. The phonological system that is implicit in the rime dictionaries and analysed in the rime tables is known as Middle Chinese, and is the traditional starting point for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. Some authors distinguish the two layers as Early and Late Middle Chinese respectively.
The earliest rime tables are associated with Chinese Buddhist monks, who are believed to have been inspired by the Sanskrit syllable charts in the Siddham script they used to study the language. The oldest extant rime tables are the 12th-century Yunjing ("mirror of rhymes") and Qiyin lüe ("summary of the seven sounds"), which are very similar, and believed to derive from a common prototype. Earlier fragmentary documents describing the analysis have been found at Dunhuang, suggesting that the tradition may date back to the late Tang dynasty.
Some scholars use the French spelling "rime", as used by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren, for the categories described in these works, to distinguish them from the concept of poetic rhyme.
The Qieyun, produced by Lu Fayan () in 601, was a rime dictionary, serving as a guide to the recitation of literary texts and an aid in the composition of verse. It quickly became popular during the Tang dynasty, leading to a series of revised and expanded editions, the most important of which was the Guangyun (1008). In these dictionaries, characters were grouped first by the four tones, and then into rhyme groups. Each rhyme group was subdivided into groups of homophonous characters, with the pronunciation of each given by a fanqie formula, a pair of familiar characters indicating the sounds of the initial and final parts of a syllable respectively.
Official source
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