An Interactive Database of Qù-Tone Alternations from the Jīngdiǎn Shìwén
Alternations in the entering tone (qù-tone) in Ancient Chinese have for a long time fascinated scholars, since they seem to give hint to relics of morphology in the history of Chinese, contrasting strongly with the isolating structure of all modern varieties of Chinese. Here we present a transparently assembled collection of entering tone alternations in the history of Chinese, derived from Lù Démíngs historical annotation of the classics, the Jīngdiǎn Shìwén, which gives early hints on such alternations by means of historical fǎnqiè spellings.
If you use this data or want to refer to it in your work, check our draft that presents some major ideas that went into the construction of this database.
Meisterernst, B. and J.-M. List (2025): A database of qù-tone alternations in Ancient Chinese [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. Open Research Europe 5.326. 1-9. [Preprint, under review, not peer-reviewed]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.21142.1
This research was funded by the DFG project 511963436 (Barbara Meisterernst: Event Structure and Diachronic Change in Chinese: A Morpho-syntactic Study ) and the the ERC Consolidator Grant 101044282 (Johann-Mattis List: Productive Signs). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union, the European Research Council Executive Agency, or the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (nor any other funding agencies involved). Neither the European Union nor the granting authorities can be held responsible for them.