Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa.

• Author: Branner, David Prager
• Position: ABC Chinese Dictionary Series - Book review

Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa. BY AXEL SCHUESSLER. ABC Chinese Dictionary Series. Honolulu: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS, 2009. Pp. xxvi + 423. $58.

This superb handbook, described with needless modesty as a companion to Karlgren's 1957 Recensa, is the most useful reference work on Chinese historical phonology to appear in some time. In addition to his highly accessible presentation of phonological detail, Axel Schuessler offers a vision of Chinese historical phonology that is economical and flexible, without losing its philological grounding or its linguistic validity.

The book features reconstructions of three major pre-modern forms of Chinese: medieval ("Middle Chinese"), the "later Han" that the author has made his special study for two or three decades, and a new "Minimal Old Chinese" that will be prove very useful to sinologists. The three forms are easily reviewed by eye because of the neat tabular format used--an improvement over Karlgren. Where appropriate, Schuessler also provides older Mandarin transcriptional records (drawing on the work of W. South Coblin), evidence from major Chinese dialects, and "etymology," which for early Chinese means likely cognates or comparanda from Tibeto-Burman languages. This last material is judiciously gleaned from the author's larger 2007 ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press). Homophones are distinguished where possible by terse glosses, and there is an index of the numbering in Karlgren's 1957 work. Each of the thirty-eight sections is prefaced by a table summarizing the relationships among Old and medieval Chinese phonological categories. There are plenty of useful notes about irregularities and curious words, but not so many as to distract the reader. The book's focus is trained sharply on phonology, and readers desiring fuller discussion of possible cognate words are referred to the 2007 Etymological Dictionary.

The book's thirty-nine-page introduction is a lucid presentation of the main issues in Old Chinese. Of foremost importance here is section 6, describing the "principles and criteria" for Schuessler's Minimal Old Chinese. Concisely, this reconstruction is based on William H. Baxter's 1992 system, simplified in places and without most of the elaborate morphology that Baxter and Laurent Sagart have experimented with since 1992. A few examples suffice to show the variety among recent Western...