Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction

Chinese Text Project

William H. Baxter; Laurent Sagart - Oxford University Press, 2014

Book description

This book introduces a new linguistic reconstruction of the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of Old Chinese, the language of the earliest Chinese classical texts (1st millennium BCE).

Reviews and discussion

New reconstruction of Old Chinese (上古漢語) by Baxter and Sagart

(bao_pu)

In case anyone isn't aware, William Baxter and Laurent Sagart have finally published their book on the early Chinese language: Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction: global.oup.com/academic/produc...

Note also that almost 5000 reconstructed Chinese words are freely available on pdf here: ocbaxtersagart.lsait.lsa.umich.edu/

Baxter-Sagart reconstruct the phonology, morphology and lexicon of Old Chinese (Shanggu hanyu). They write: "Reconstructing the linguistic features of this 3000-year-old language is not just a matter of satisfying the curiosity of historical linguists; in fact, it is crucial to interpreting the foundational texts of Chinese civilization. With an ancient text from Greece or Rome, written in alphabetic script, the words are usually easy to identify, and one can begin to interpret the text without worrying excessively about how it was actually pronounced. But when reading early Chinese texts, reconstructing pronunciation often plays a crucial role in the initial process of identifying words of a text themselves – a fact recognized for centuries by Chinese scholars." (p. 1)

The English glosses are simple and are for identification purposes only. See Kroll's forthcoming dictionary of Classical Chinese or the Thesaurus Linguae Sericae website for more in-depth English glosses: tls.uni-hd.de/main/basic_ch_le...