Yunhai jingyuan

The (c. 780) Yunhai jingyuan 韻海鏡源 Ocean of Rhymes, Mirror of Sources Chinese dictionary, which was compiled by the Tang dynasty official and calligrapher Yan Zhengqing (709–785), was the first phonologically-arranged rime dictionary of words rather than characters. Although the Yunhai jingyuan is a lost work, several later dictionaries, such as the (1711) Peiwen Yunfu, followed its system of collating entries by the tone and rime of the last character in a term.

Yunhai jingyuan
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese韻海鏡源
Simplified Chinese韵海镜源
Literal meaningrhyme ocean mirror source
Korean name
Hangul운해경원
Hanja韻海鏡源
Japanese name
Kanji韻海鏡源
Hiraganaうんかいきょうげん
Yan Zhengqing, compiler of the Yunhai jingyuan

Title

The title Yunhai jingyuan compounds four words (translation equivalents from Wenlin 2015):

  • yùn 韻 "rime; rime-class; tone; agreeable sound; charm; appeal; final; syllable final"
  • hǎi 海 "sea; ocean; big lake; huge group (of people/things); great capacity"
  • jìng 鏡 "mirror; lens; glass"
  • yuán 源 "source (of a river); fountainhead; source; cause; origin"

English translations include:

  • Mirror-origin of the Sea of Rhymes (Gimello and Gregory 1983: 191)
  • Mirror of the Ocean of Rhymes (Needham, Lu, and Huang 1986: 219)
  • Mirror-source of the Ocean of Rhymes (McRae 1993: 71)
  • Mirror & Origin of the Ocean of Rhymes (Zhou and Zhang 2003: 72).
  • The Sources of Rhyme Ocean (Yong and Peng 2008: 172)

Text

The Yunhai jingyuan included 26,911 character head entries and comprised 360 volumes (juǎn 卷 "roll; volume"; Zhou and Zhang 2003: 72). By any standards, it was a very large dictionary, and "by the standards of the time it must have been simply gigantic" (Needham and Harbsmeier 1998: 78). For more than two centuries, the Yunhai jingyuan remained the most inclusive Chinese dictionary, until the (1039) Jiyun with 53,525 character entries.

Compared with two contemporary 100-volume dictionaries, the Guiyuan zhucong 桂苑珠叢 by Zhuge Ying 諸葛潁 (539-615) and the 100-volume Zihai 字海 compiled under the direction of Empress Wu Zetian (r. 690-705), the Yunhai jingyuan was an "even more miraculous lexicographical work" (Yong and Peng 2008: 178).

Chinese dictionaries are traditionally dichotomized between zìdiǎn 字典 "character dictionaries" and cídiǎn 辭典 "word dictionaries". In the history of Chinese lexicography, the Yunhai jingyuan was the earliest hybrid of a word dictionary and a rime dictionary (Yong and Peng 2008: 226). Earlier rime dictionaries that only included characters include (c. 230) Shenglei and the (601) Qieyun, which was revised as the (720) Tangyun 唐韻.

In 773, during the reign of Emperor Daizong of Tang (r. 762-779). Yan Zhengqing assembled a group of over 50 scholars with diverse backgrounds to compile the Yunhai jingyuan at his residence in Huzhou. They included several of his literary friends, the Daoist poet Zhang Zhihe, the Chan Buddhist monk Jiaoran 皎然, and Lu Yu, author of The Classic of Tea (Benn 2015: 108). In the same year, the Yunhailou 韻海樓 "Ocean of Rhymes Building" was constructed as the depository for its namesake Yunhai jingyuan. The building was restored in 1666, and is presently a municipal library and cultural center in Huzhou, Zhejiang prefecture.

Yan Zhengqing's reference work included not only single-syllable words but also multi-character compounds, and even some chengyu "set phrases". This type of specialized dictionary was intended for the composition of poems, retrieving literary quotations, and finding appropriate words for antithetical couplets (Yong and Peng 2008: 330).

The word or phrase entries in the Yunhai jingyuan were phonologically arranged by the 106 rime groups of the Pingshui (lit. 平水 "level water") system, which is based on the traditional four tones: ping "level", shang "rising", qu "departing", and ru "entering". Note that the term rime is used, as opposed to common rhyme, in the linguistic sense of syllable rime or Chinese rime table. A dictionary user looks up a word by the tone and rime of the final character, which presumes that the user already knows, or can guess, how to pronounce the character. For speakers of alphabetic languages who are familiar with easy dictionary lookup, using a Chinese dictionary based on the Yunhai jingyuan system is very user-unfriendly.

Three later dictionaries of literary allusions followed the 106-rime arrangement of the Yunhai jingyuan. First were the Yuan dynasty (c. 1280) Yunfu qunyu 韻府群玉 "Assembly of Jade Tablets, a Word-Store arranged by Rhymes" compiled by Yin Shifu 陰時夫 and the Ming dynasty (1592) Wuche yunrui 五車韻瑞 "Five Cartloads of Rhyme-inscribed Jade Tablets" by Ling Zhilong 淩稚隆. Ultimately the Qing dynasty (1711) Peiwen yunfu "Word-store arranged by Rhymes, from the Hall of the Admiration of Literature" expanded entries and corrected errors in previous rime dictionaries, resulting in 212 volumes with 10,257 head entries arranged by the 106 Pingshui rime categories (tr. Needham et al. 1986: 219; Yong and Peng 2008: 330).

The (1728) Pianzi leipian 駢字類編 "Classified Collection of Phrases and Literary Allusions" dictionary was the first dictionary to abandon the traditional Yunhai jingyuan system of indexing words by their last character's rime and tone, and it indexed words by their first character (Needham et al. 1986: 219). Most subsequent Chinese word dictionaries were internally arranged by the graphic radical of the first character in a word.

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See also

References
  • Benn, James A. (2015), Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History, Hong Kong University Press.
  • Gimello, Robert M. and Peter N. Gregory (1983), Studies in Ch'an and Hua-yen, University of Hawaii Press.
  • McRae, John R. (1993), "Yanagida Seizan's Landmark Works on Chinese Ch'an", Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie Année 7.1: 51-103
  • Needham, Joseph, Lu Gwei-djen, and Huang Hsing-Tsung (1986), Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 6 Biology and Biological Technology, Part 1: Botany, Cambridge University Press.
  • Needham, Joseph and Christoph Harbsmeier (1998) Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 7, Language and Logic in Traditional China", Cambridge University Press.
  • Yong, Heming and Jing Peng (2008), Chinese Lexicography: A History from 1046 BC to AD 1911, Oxford University Press.
  • Zhou Youguang 周有光 (2003), The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts, tr. by Zhang Liqing 張立青, National East Asian Languages Resource Center, Ohio State University.
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