Draft:Chinese philology

In traditional Confucian scholarship, philology revolved around study of the language used in the Chinese classics, which were largely composed between the 6th and 3rd centuries BC. By the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD), the Chinese language had evolved considerably from the form in these texts, which is now known as Classical Chinese. As written characters correspond to words rather than sounds, they rarely represent shifts in pronunciations over time in the varieties of Chinese, and eventually required elaborate reconstructions by scholars. Chinese philology focused on elements of the etymology, pronunciation, and graphical form of words in the Classical lexicon. Early scholarly output encompassed Chinese dictionaries like the Erya (c. 3rd century BC), Fangyan (c. 1st century AD), and Shuowen Jiezi (c. 100 AD), which each established concepts central to the autochthonous understanding of the nature of the Chinese language. The field was called 'lesser learning' to contrast it with the 'greater learning' of direct

Origins
It is not clear that Classical Chinese authors used a concept of "words" or "word-meaning" analogous to that in the Western paradigm, and thus there is no obvious notion of parts of speech. There was a common preoccupation during the Classical period with names ; from the Shuowen Jiezi (c. 100 AD) onward, there was also the clear notion of characters. The first clear indication of Chinese authors articulating a concept of "words" is in the translation of and commentary on Sanskrit Buddhist texts during the 5th century. While written characters were always discretized and always correspond one-to-one with monosyllabic morphemes, abstract segments of language like,  , and   are not consistently defined from text to text, as they are for modern Chinese writers.

Scope and purpose

 * Siku Quanshu
 * ''Confucian classics

Etymology
訓詁
 * Erya

Phonology
音韻
 * Fangyan
 * Qieyun
 * Guangyun

Graphology
文字
 * Shuowen Jiezi