fbpx
Wikipedia

Bernhard Karlgren

March 04, 2023

Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈbæ̌ːɳaɖ ˈkɑ̂ːɭɡreːn]; 15 October 1889 – 20 October 1978) was a Swedish sinologist and linguist who pioneered the study of Chinese historical phonology using modern comparative methods. In the early 20th century, Karlgren conducted large surveys of the varieties of Chinese and studied historical information on rhyming in ancient Chinese poetry, then used them to create the first ever complete reconstructions of what are now called Middle Chinese and Old Chinese.

Bernhard Karlgren
Born(1889-10-15)15 October 1889
Jönköping, Sweden-Norway
Died20 October 1978(1978-10-20) (aged 89)
Stockholm, Sweden
Alma materUppsala University
Known forPioneering reconstructions of Middle Chinese and Old Chinese
Scientific career
FieldsAncient Chinese linguistics, literature
InstitutionsMuseum of Far Eastern Antiquities
University of Gothenburg
Academic advisorsJohan August Lundell
Notable studentsHans Bielenstein
Göran Malmqvist
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese高本漢
Simplified Chinese高本汉
Hanyu PinyinGāo Běnhàn
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu PinyinGāo Běnhàn
Bopomofoㄍㄠ   ㄅㄣˇ   ㄏㄢˋ
Gwoyeu RomatzyhGau Beenhann
Wade–GilesKao1 Pên3-han4
Tongyong PinyinGao Běnhàn
Yale RomanizationGāu Běnhàn
MPS2Gāu Běn-hàn
IPA[káʊ pə̀n.xân]

Early life and education

Bernhard Karlgren was born on 15 October 1889 in Jönköping, Sweden. His father, Johannes Karlgren, taught Latin, Greek, and Swedish at the local high school.[1] Karlgren showed ability in linguistics from a young age, and was interested in Sweden's dialects and traditional folk stories.[2] He mastered classical languages and was an accomplished translator of Greek poetry into his native language. He displayed an early interest in China, and wrote a drama, The White Hind, set in that country in his early teens.[3] His first scholarly article, a phonetic transcription, based on a system devised by Johan August Lundell, of traditional folk stories from his native province of Småland, was completed when he was 14,[4] and published in 1908 when he was only 18 years old.[5] He studied Russian at Uppsala University under Johan August Lundell, a Slavicist interested in comparative linguistics. He graduated in 1909 with a bachelor's degree in Nordic, Greek, and Slavonic languages.[6] Although he initially intended to specialize in the Scandinavian languages, on the advice of his elder brother Anton Karlgren (1882–1973) he decided to focus on Chinese instead,[7] attracted to it also by the fact that, as Lundell had told him, Chinese contained a great number of dialects.[8] He departed for St. Petersburg, which, under the guidance of Vasily Vasilyev, had created one of the major European centres for the study of Chinese. While there, Karlgren, studying under A. I. Ivanov, won a grant to study Chinese dialects, even though he had no background in Chinese at that point.[2]

Karlgren lived in China from 1910 to 1912. He achieved basic fluency and literacy after only a few months of study, and prepared a questionnaire of 3,100 Chinese characters to gather information on Chinese dialects.[2] After his grant money ran out, Karlgren supported himself by teaching French and, famously, English, which, according to one anecdote, he had never been taught but had picked up from English-speaking passengers on the ship from Europe to China.[9] In fact he had received a high credit in English in his final High School exams.[10] He eventually gathered data on 19 different Mandarin dialects, as well as Shanghainese, the Fuzhou dialect of Eastern Min, and Cantonese, plus the Vietnamese and Japanese pronunciations of the characters in his questionnaire.[9]

Career

Karlgren returned to Europe in January 1912, first staying in London, then in Paris, before arriving in Uppsala, where in 1915 he produced his doctoral dissertation, "Études sur la phonologie chinoise" ("Studies on Chinese Phonology"). Although his dissertation was written in French, most of his subsequent scholarly works were in English. After obtaining his doctorate, Karlgren taught at the University of Gothenburg, serving as its rector from 1931 to 1936.

In 1939, Karlgren succeeded Johan Gunnar Andersson as director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Östasiatiska Museet), a post he held until 1959. This public museum was founded in 1926 on Andersson's pioneering discoveries of prehistoric archaeology made in China in the 1920s, and later expanded to cover later periods as well as other parts of Asia. Karlgren had been in close contact with Andersson for many years, and also succeeded Andersson as editor of the museum's journal, the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (BMFEA, 1929–) and continued in this position until the 1970s. Karlgren himself first published many of his own major works in this annual journal, or as books in the monograph series of the museum.

In 1946, Karlgren began a far-reaching attack on the then rather loosely argued historiography of ancient China. Reviewing the literature on China's pre-Han history in his article Legends and Cults in Ancient China, he pointed out that "a common feature to most of these treatises is a curious lack of critical method in the handling of the material". In particular, Karlgren criticised the unselective use of documents from different ages when reconstructing China's ancient history. "In this way very full and detailed accounts have been arrived at—but accounts that are indeed caricatures of scientifically established ones."

In 1950, Karlgren was inducted into the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.[11]

Death and legacy

Karlgren died on 20 October 1978 in Stockholm at age 89.

Karlgren was the first scholar to use European-style principles of historical linguistics to study the Chinese language. He was also the first one to reconstruct the sounds of what are now called Middle Chinese and Old Chinese (what he called "Ancient Chinese" and "Archaic Chinese" respectively). Karlgren suggested that at the very earliest stage recoverable, the personal pronouns were declined for case.

Karlgren attempted to unearth Chinese history itself from its linguistic development and diffusion. As he writes in his English adaptation Sound and Symbol in Chinese (1923), Chapter I: "Thus, though Chinese traditions give no hint whatever of an immigration from any foreign country, and though there consequently is no external chronological point d'appui, we are nonetheless able to state, from internal evidence, that the Chinese tradition which places the reign of the emperor Yao in the twenty-fourth century B.C. is correct; that the Chinese even in those remote times were skilled astronomers; that they put down in writing in the Chinese language records of memorable events, and in all probability wrote their accounts soon after the events; in short, that a well-developed Chinese civilization—resting undoubtedly on foundations many centuries old—together with the Chinese language, existed on Chinese soil two thousand years before Christ."

Although important as a pioneer of historical Chinese linguistics, Karlgren's original findings have been surpassed. Today the phonological systems proposed by Karlgren have largely been superseded, as their weaknesses are obvious: "Karlgren saw himself as reconstructing phonetics, not phonology, and paid little attention to phonological structure. As a result, the systems he reconstructed often lack the symmetry and pattern which are in the phonological systems of natural languages."[12] Nevertheless, Karlgren's groundbreaking works laid the foundation of modern Chinese historical linguistics and many of his works are still used as works of reference.[13]

Awards and decorations

Selected works

  • — (1915). Études sur la phonologie chinoise (Doctoral thesis). University of Uppsala. hdl:10111/UIUCBB:karlbe0001etusur.
  • — (1918). Ordet och Pennan i Mittens Rike. Adapted as Sound and symbol in Chinese, London: Oxford University Press, 1923. Reprinted 2007: Toronto: Global Language Press, ISBN 978-0-9738924-0-6.
  • — (1922). "The reconstruction of Ancient Chinese". T'oung Pao. 21: 1–42. doi:10.1163/156853222X00015.
  • — (1923). Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese. Paris: Paul Geuthner. Reprinted by Dover Publications, ISBN 978-0-486-21887-8.
  • — (1929). "The Authenticity of Ancient Chinese Texts". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 1: 165–183.
  • — (1931). "The Early History of the Chou Li and Tso Chuan Texts". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 5: 1–59.
  • — (1931). "Tibetan and Chinese". T'oung Pao. Second Series. 28 (1–2): 25–70. doi:10.1163/156853231X00024. JSTOR 4526964.
  • — (1933). "Word Families in Chinese". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 5: 9–120.
  • — (1937). "New Studies on Chinese Bronzes". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 9: 9–117.
  • — (1940). "Grammata Serica, Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 12: 1–471.
  • — (1941). "Huai and Han". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 13: 1–125.
  • — (1942). "Glosses on the Kuo Feng Odes". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 14: 71–247.
  • — (1944). "Glosses on the Siao ya odes". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 16: 25–139.
  • — (1946). "Glosses on the Ta Ya and Sung Odes". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 18: 1–198.
  • — (1946). "Legends and Cults in Ancient China". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 18: 199–365.
  • — (1950). "The Book of Documents". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 22: 1–81.
  • — (1954). "Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 26: 211–367.
  • — (1957). "Grammata Serica Recensa". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 29: 1–332.

In Swedish he published numerous popular works on Chinese language, culture and history. In the 1940s, he published three novels under the pen name Klas Gullman.

See also

Notes

Footnotes
  1. ^ Malmqvist (2011), p. 1.
  2. ^ a b c Ramsey (1987), p. 126.
  3. ^ Malmqvist (2011), p. 28.
  4. ^ Malmqvist (2011), p. 35.
  5. ^ Malmqvist (1979), p. 142.
  6. ^ Malmqvist (2011), p. 37.
  7. ^ Bielenstein (1979), p. 553.
  8. ^ Malmqvist (2011), pp. 35–36.
  9. ^ a b Ramsey (1987), p. 127.
  10. ^ Malmqvist (2011), p. 36.
  11. ^ "K.B.J. Karlgren (1889–1978)". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 22 July 2015.
  12. ^ Baxter (1992), p. 3-4.
  13. ^ von Falkenhausen, Lothar (2001). "Review of Göran Malmqvist, Bernhard Karlgren: Ett forskarporträtt". China Review International. 8 (1): 15–33. doi:10.1353/cri.2001.0020.
  14. ^ Sköldenberg, Bengt, ed. (1969). Sveriges statskalender. 1969 (PDF) (in Swedish). Stockholm: Fritzes offentliga publikationer. p. 151. SELIBR 3682754.
Works cited
  • Baxter, William H. (1992). A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyer.
  • Bielenstein, Hans (1979). "Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978)". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 99 (3): 553. JSTOR 602522.
  • Malmqvist, Göran (1979). "Bernhard Karlgren in Memoriam". Journal of Chinese Linguistics. 7 (1): 142–3. JSTOR 23753040.
  • ——— (2011). Bernhard Karlgren: Portrait of a Scholar. Bethlehem, PA; Lanham, MD: Lehigh University Press; Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-61146-001-8. Translation of Göran Malmqvist, Bernhard Karlgren: ett forskarporträtt [Bernhard Karlgren: Portrait of a Scholar], Stockholm: Norstedts. 1995.
  • Ramsey, S. Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

March 04, 2023
bernhard, karlgren, klas, bernhard, johannes, karlgren, swedish, pronunciation, ˈbæ, ːɳaɖ, ˈkɑ, ːɭɡreːn, october, 1889, october, 1978, swedish, sinologist, linguist, pioneered, study, chinese, historical, phonology, using, modern, comparative, methods, early, . Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren Swedish pronunciation ˈbae ːɳaɖ ˈkɑ ːɭɡreːn 15 October 1889 20 October 1978 was a Swedish sinologist and linguist who pioneered the study of Chinese historical phonology using modern comparative methods In the early 20th century Karlgren conducted large surveys of the varieties of Chinese and studied historical information on rhyming in ancient Chinese poetry then used them to create the first ever complete reconstructions of what are now called Middle Chinese and Old Chinese Bernhard KarlgrenBorn 1889 10 15 15 October 1889Jonkoping Sweden NorwayDied20 October 1978 1978 10 20 aged 89 Stockholm SwedenAlma materUppsala UniversityKnown forPioneering reconstructions of Middle Chinese and Old ChineseScientific careerFieldsAncient Chinese linguistics literatureInstitutionsMuseum of Far Eastern Antiquities University of GothenburgAcademic advisorsJohan August LundellNotable studentsHans BielensteinGoran MalmqvistChinese nameTraditional Chinese高本漢Simplified Chinese高本汉Hanyu PinyinGao BenhanTranscriptionsStandard MandarinHanyu PinyinGao BenhanBopomofoㄍㄠ ㄅㄣˇ ㄏㄢˋGwoyeu RomatzyhGau BeenhannWade GilesKao1 Pen3 han4Tongyong PinyinGao BenhanYale RomanizationGau BenhanMPS2Gau Ben hanIPA ka ʊ pe n xa n Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Career 3 Death and legacy 4 Awards and decorations 5 Selected works 6 See also 7 NotesEarly life and education EditBernhard Karlgren was born on 15 October 1889 in Jonkoping Sweden His father Johannes Karlgren taught Latin Greek and Swedish at the local high school 1 Karlgren showed ability in linguistics from a young age and was interested in Sweden s dialects and traditional folk stories 2 He mastered classical languages and was an accomplished translator of Greek poetry into his native language He displayed an early interest in China and wrote a drama The White Hind set in that country in his early teens 3 His first scholarly article a phonetic transcription based on a system devised by Johan August Lundell of traditional folk stories from his native province of Smaland was completed when he was 14 4 and published in 1908 when he was only 18 years old 5 He studied Russian at Uppsala University under Johan August Lundell a Slavicist interested in comparative linguistics He graduated in 1909 with a bachelor s degree in Nordic Greek and Slavonic languages 6 Although he initially intended to specialize in the Scandinavian languages on the advice of his elder brother Anton Karlgren 1882 1973 he decided to focus on Chinese instead 7 attracted to it also by the fact that as Lundell had told him Chinese contained a great number of dialects 8 He departed for St Petersburg which under the guidance of Vasily Vasilyev had created one of the major European centres for the study of Chinese While there Karlgren studying under A I Ivanov won a grant to study Chinese dialects even though he had no background in Chinese at that point 2 Karlgren lived in China from 1910 to 1912 He achieved basic fluency and literacy after only a few months of study and prepared a questionnaire of 3 100 Chinese characters to gather information on Chinese dialects 2 After his grant money ran out Karlgren supported himself by teaching French and famously English which according to one anecdote he had never been taught but had picked up from English speaking passengers on the ship from Europe to China 9 In fact he had received a high credit in English in his final High School exams 10 He eventually gathered data on 19 different Mandarin dialects as well as Shanghainese the Fuzhou dialect of Eastern Min and Cantonese plus the Vietnamese and Japanese pronunciations of the characters in his questionnaire 9 Career EditKarlgren returned to Europe in January 1912 first staying in London then in Paris before arriving in Uppsala where in 1915 he produced his doctoral dissertation Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise Studies on Chinese Phonology Although his dissertation was written in French most of his subsequent scholarly works were in English After obtaining his doctorate Karlgren taught at the University of Gothenburg serving as its rector from 1931 to 1936 In 1939 Karlgren succeeded Johan Gunnar Andersson as director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities Ostasiatiska Museet a post he held until 1959 This public museum was founded in 1926 on Andersson s pioneering discoveries of prehistoric archaeology made in China in the 1920s and later expanded to cover later periods as well as other parts of Asia Karlgren had been in close contact with Andersson for many years and also succeeded Andersson as editor of the museum s journal the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities BMFEA 1929 and continued in this position until the 1970s Karlgren himself first published many of his own major works in this annual journal or as books in the monograph series of the museum In 1946 Karlgren began a far reaching attack on the then rather loosely argued historiography of ancient China Reviewing the literature on China s pre Han history in his article Legends and Cults in Ancient China he pointed out that a common feature to most of these treatises is a curious lack of critical method in the handling of the material In particular Karlgren criticised the unselective use of documents from different ages when reconstructing China s ancient history In this way very full and detailed accounts have been arrived at but accounts that are indeed caricatures of scientifically established ones In 1950 Karlgren was inducted into the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences 11 Death and legacy EditKarlgren died on 20 October 1978 in Stockholm at age 89 Karlgren was the first scholar to use European style principles of historical linguistics to study the Chinese language He was also the first one to reconstruct the sounds of what are now called Middle Chinese and Old Chinese what he called Ancient Chinese and Archaic Chinese respectively Karlgren suggested that at the very earliest stage recoverable the personal pronouns were declined for case Karlgren attempted to unearth Chinese history itself from its linguistic development and diffusion As he writes in his English adaptation Sound and Symbol in Chinese 1923 Chapter I Thus though Chinese traditions give no hint whatever of an immigration from any foreign country and though there consequently is no external chronological point d appui we are nonetheless able to state from internal evidence that the Chinese tradition which places the reign of the emperor Yao in the twenty fourth century B C is correct that the Chinese even in those remote times were skilled astronomers that they put down in writing in the Chinese language records of memorable events and in all probability wrote their accounts soon after the events in short that a well developed Chinese civilization resting undoubtedly on foundations many centuries old together with the Chinese language existed on Chinese soil two thousand years before Christ Although important as a pioneer of historical Chinese linguistics Karlgren s original findings have been surpassed Today the phonological systems proposed by Karlgren have largely been superseded as their weaknesses are obvious Karlgren saw himself as reconstructing phonetics not phonology and paid little attention to phonological structure As a result the systems he reconstructed often lack the symmetry and pattern which are in the phonological systems of natural languages 12 Nevertheless Karlgren s groundbreaking works laid the foundation of modern Chinese historical linguistics and many of his works are still used as works of reference 13 Awards and decorations Edit Commander Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star 23 November 1961 14 Selected works Edit 1915 Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise Doctoral thesis University of Uppsala hdl 10111 UIUCBB karlbe0001etusur 1918 Ordet och Pennan i Mittens Rike Adapted as Sound and symbol in Chinese London Oxford University Press 1923 Reprinted 2007 Toronto Global Language Press ISBN 978 0 9738924 0 6 1922 The reconstruction of Ancient Chinese T oung Pao 21 1 42 doi 10 1163 156853222X00015 1923 Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino Japanese Paris Paul Geuthner Reprinted by Dover Publications ISBN 978 0 486 21887 8 1929 The Authenticity of Ancient Chinese Texts Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 1 165 183 1931 The Early History of the Chou Li and Tso Chuan Texts Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 5 1 59 1931 Tibetan and Chinese T oung Pao Second Series 28 1 2 25 70 doi 10 1163 156853231X00024 JSTOR 4526964 1933 Word Families in Chinese Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 5 9 120 1937 New Studies on Chinese Bronzes Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 9 9 117 1940 Grammata Serica Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino Japanese Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 12 1 471 1941 Huai and Han Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 13 1 125 1942 Glosses on the Kuo Feng Odes Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 14 71 247 1944 Glosses on the Siao ya odes Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 16 25 139 1946 Glosses on the Ta Ya and Sung Odes Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 18 1 198 1946 Legends and Cults in Ancient China Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 18 199 365 1950 The Book of Documents Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 22 1 81 1954 Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 26 211 367 1957 Grammata Serica Recensa Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 29 1 332 In Swedish he published numerous popular works on Chinese language culture and history In the 1940s he published three novels under the pen name Klas Gullman See also Edit Sweden portal China portal Biography portalGrammata Serica Recensa Karlgren Li reconstruction of Middle ChineseNotes EditFootnotes Malmqvist 2011 p 1 a b c Ramsey 1987 p 126 Malmqvist 2011 p 28 Malmqvist 2011 p 35 Malmqvist 1979 p 142 Malmqvist 2011 p 37 Bielenstein 1979 p 553 Malmqvist 2011 pp 35 36 a b Ramsey 1987 p 127 Malmqvist 2011 p 36 K B J Karlgren 1889 1978 Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Retrieved 22 July 2015 Baxter 1992 p 3 4 von Falkenhausen Lothar 2001 Review of Goran Malmqvist Bernhard Karlgren Ett forskarportratt China Review International 8 1 15 33 doi 10 1353 cri 2001 0020 Skoldenberg Bengt ed 1969 Sveriges statskalender 1969 PDF in Swedish Stockholm Fritzes offentliga publikationer p 151 SELIBR 3682754 Works citedBaxter William H 1992 A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology Berlin New York Mouton de Gruyer Bielenstein Hans 1979 Bernhard Karlgren 1889 1978 Journal of the American Oriental Society 99 3 553 JSTOR 602522 Malmqvist Goran 1979 Bernhard Karlgren in Memoriam Journal of Chinese Linguistics 7 1 142 3 JSTOR 23753040 2011 Bernhard Karlgren Portrait of a Scholar Bethlehem PA Lanham MD Lehigh University Press Rowman amp Littlefield ISBN 978 1 61146 001 8 Translation of Goran Malmqvist Bernhard Karlgren ett forskarportratt Bernhard Karlgren Portrait of a Scholar Stockholm Norstedts 1995 Ramsey S Robert 1987 The Languages of China Princeton Princeton University Press Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Bernhard Karlgren amp oldid 1141776890, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

article

, read, download, free, free download, mp3, video, mp4, 3gp, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, picture, music, song, movie, book, game, games.