Yang Xiong's Colloquial Dictionary Annotations and Corroboration (Volume 1 and 2)

Author: Hu Xuecheng Hui Zhen, Wang Zhiqun, Xie Rong'e, Wang Caiqin (Associate Editors)
Publisher:
Publishing Date: Not Available
Features: Macroscopically speaking, dialects hold an important position in the history of Chinese linguistics. Specifically, the following points can be summarized: , it emphasizes the temporal changes of language and its spatial and geographical shifts. Second, it proposed the regional division of Chinese dialects at the time. Third, it introduced the concept of (translingual influence). Fourth, it adopted oral investigation methods for collecting dialectal vocabulary. In all these aspects, it was also leading in the world at that time. In ancient Greece, scholars noticed the linguistic divergence of the four dialects of ancient Greek; ancient Indian scholar Varahamihira wrote the Prakriti Grantham, describing some grammatical phenomena of Indian dialects at the time, but they rarely addressed the differences in dialectal vocabulary. In this sense, Yang Xiong's Dialects stood out among contemporary works. If we turn our attention to medieval Arabia, the significance of dialects becomes even more prominent. Medieval Arabia was renowned for its lexicography, compiling dictionaries for various tribal languages. However, they rarely elaborated on the historical evolution of words or their geographical distribution, whereas Yang Xiong's Dialects had successfully addressed this issue centuries earlier.