The changing pronunciation of Chinese during the Han dynasty: applying graph theory to poetic rhymes

Chinese is famous for its short simple words, its tones, and its simple grammar, but in the distant past Chinese was a very different language; Old Chinese (1300-100 BCE) lacked tones, had consonant clusters as impressive as those of German or Georgian, and it used prefixes and suffixes to form new words. By 602 CE, the date of the earliest Chinese pronunciation dictionary, Middle Chinese was already recognizably a form of the language we known today. How did Chinese change so much? The Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) holds the key; it was the first enduring empire in Chinese history, and among the most formative periods for Chinese thought and literature. This one-day workshop will present the current results of ongoing research on Han dynasty poetry, using the digital humanities techniques of graph theory. These methods promise to unlock new insights into the history of Chinese pronunciation and adjudicate areas of current controversy. 10:00-10:15am - Welcome 10:15-11:00am - James Engels (SOAS), "The contribution of the Xiesheng hypothesis to competing theories of the Old Chinese vowel system" [remote presentation] 11:00-11:45am - Ash Henson (SOAS), "Using network theory for detecting rhyme communities in Han Dynasty rhyming texts" 11:45am-12:30pm - Nathan W. Hill (TCD), "The abstractions adequate to Chinese historical phonology" 12:30-1:30pm - Lunch 1:30-2:15pm - Julien Baley (Microsoft), "Evaluating rhyme annotations for large corpora: metrics and data" 2:15-3:00pm - Chris Foster (SOAS), "Evidence for final *-r in the Cang Jie pian and other primers" 3:00-3:45pm - Jeff Tharsen (Chicago), TBC [remote presentation] 3:45-4:00pm - Closing