Rhyme Books and Dengyun

Abstract

Among the extant materials of fanqie in the rhyme books of the Song Dynasty, there are 3,815 phoneticized characters (qieyin) in Guangyun, and 4,473 phoneticizations in Jiyun, which seem highly fragmented and meticulous. As a matter of fact, so many phonological variants are not likely to exist in the speech repertoire of a single person or a speech community. Take Guangyun as an example, among more than three thousand fanqie characters, there are 466 upper characters to represent initial consonants, and 1,196 lower characters for the syllable finals. Many of these phoneticizations are in fact identical, and some only vary slightly. The study of these scattered materials, therefore, involves trimming and generalization.