THE DICTIONARIES OF RHYME AS CARRIERS OF PHONETIC CODIFICATION OF ANCIENT CHINESE LANGUAGE

Abstract

The organization and content of the dictionaries reflect the level of development of linguistic knowledge and the accumulated experience of language research. Dictionaries, the history of their origin, the need for compilation, features of structure and use can provide a lot of factual material about the language, the processes of its normalization and codification, cultural and social changes. The uniqueness of the Chinese philological tradition is clearly manifested through a detailed examination of such a specific phenomenon of Chinese lexicography as the dictionaries of Rhyme. The main purpose of such dictionaries is to help choose the appropriate rhyme when composing poems. But the great importance of poetry for ancient China, inextricably linked with poetry, Confucian philosophy, due to the widespread use of poetry, made the dictionaries of Rhyme carriers of phonetic codification, in fact, a tool for standardizing pronunciation. The relevance of the study is due to the need for a comprehensive study of ancient Chinese dictionaries of Rhyme, carriers of phonetic codification. There are no scientific works in domestic Chinese studies devoted to a comprehensive analysis of ancient Chinese dictionaries of Rhyme, the history of their formation and development. In addition, there are no works that consider dictionaries of Rhyme as a phenomenon of phonetic codification of ancient China. This situation in the scientific space not only determined the relevance of the study, but also indicated the prospects of theoretical scientific research. It should be noted that the study of ancient Chinese dictionaries of Rhyme cannot be limited to the material of one article. The purpose of this scientific research is to study the history of the origin of these dictionaries, the initial analysis of their features, as well as consideration of the means of phonetic codification of the Chinese language. The paper used a comparative method, a descriptive method for the classification and interpretation of the studied linguistic phenomena, historical and comparatively historical. The subject of research is the history of origin and features of ancient Chinese dictionaries of Rhyme. Such classifications of hieroglyphs clearly demonstrate the close connection between the phonological component forming the rhyme, the general sound of the hieroglyph and the tone. That is why the dictionaries of Rhyme, in addition to their direct function to help compose poems, also performed no less important function – acted as codifiers of pronunciation, participating in the processes of standardization of language. Historical and structural systematization of Rhyman dictionaries and concretization of a number of phonetic terms can give a new impetus to rethink the meaning of codification processes in the linguistic tradition of China.