Shuo yin 說音 [On Sound]

71 folding leaves. Small 8vo, orig. printed wrappers, orig. stitching. Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936.




Revised and enlarged (zengding 增訂) edition of this work on phonology. The book explains the traditional Chinese field of phonological studies for a contemporary audience. Jiang Qian expresses a kind of Buddhist universalist view of phonology as the description of human speech sound regardless of language. He writes that his own book was born not only from older literature, but from his experience with dialect differences in China, the different character readings in Korea and Japan, the phonetic script of English, his work in government offices, and from conversations with family, teachers, and friends.


Jiang Qian (1876-1942) was an educator and Buddhist organizer. Jiang Qian writes in the first author's Preface, dated 1922, that the book is based on lectures given in 1915-1916 in Tianjin, Jiangning, and Shanghai. A first edition was published by the Jiangsu Education Society 江蘇教育會 and Zhonghua shuju. We find no record of this edition in WorldCat. The second author's Preface, written for the enlarged edition, is dated 1930.


In the book's other Preface, historian of philosophy and Buddhologist Jiang Weiqiao 蔣維喬 (1873-1958) wrote that phonology was an unduly neglected area within philological scholarship.


Fine copy.


❧ Bian Li 卞利, ed. Huizhou wenhua shi: jindai juan 徽州文化史：近代卷. Hefei: Anhui renmin chubanshe, 2015.