Old Chinese and Friends: Advances in the Reconstruction of Old Chinese Phonology

  • Start: Apr 26, 2018
  • End: Apr 27, 2018
  • Location: MPI SHH Jena
  • Room: Villa V14
  • Host: CALC Independent research group
  • Contact: list@shh.mpg.de
The reconstruction of the phonology of Old Chinese has greatly advanced during the last decades. As a result, reconstruction systems which were proposed independently by different scholars, such as Baxter and Sagart (2014), Starostin (1989), and Zhèngzhāng (2003) resemble each other much more than earlier reconstructions (Wáng 1980, Li 1971, Karlgren 1957). With the increased consensus among scholars, Old Chinese has also begun to resemble Tibete-Burman languages much closer, which has lead to an increased research and debate about the position of Chinese within the Sino-Tibetan (or Trans-Himalayan) language family (Behr 1999, Jacques 2015). The goal of the workshop is to bring together experts on Sino-Tibetan linguistics, Ancient Chinese, Old Chinese reconstruction, and Chinese paleography to discuss future directions of research on Old Chinese phonology in the broader context of the genetic affiliation of Chinese as well as the history of the writing system with a special focus on newly excavated documents.
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