Bernhard Karlgren

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Bernhard Karlgren (1889 - 1978) was a Swedish sinologist, philologist, and the founder of Swedish sinology as a scholarly discipline. His full name was Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren, and he adopted the Chinese name 高本漢 (pinyin: Gāo Běnhàn).

Karlgren published his first scholarly article at the age of 16 on the dialect of the province of Dalarna. Later he studied at Uppsala University from 1907-1909, where he majored in Russian under Professor J. A. Lundell, a Slavicist interested in comparative phonology, and decided that he wanted to apply the methods of comparative historical phonology to Chinese, which had not yet been so studied. Since Chinese was not yet taught in Sweden, Karlgren went to St. Petersburg, where he studied Chinese with Professor A. I. Ivanoff for two months. In 1910-1912, Karlgren lived in China, where he studied Chinese and prepared phonological descriptions of 24 distinct dialects.

Karlgren returned to Europe in January 1912, first staying in London, then in Paris, before arriving in Uppsala, where he produced his doctoral dissertation in 1915. (Although his dissertation was written in French, most of his subsequent scholarly works were in English.)

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 this, Karlgren was following in the footsteps of many Chinese scholars from the early 20th century, as he himself acknowledged.^[1]

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 actual sounds of what is now called Middle Chinese and Old Chinese (what he called "Ancient Chinese" and "Archaic Chinese" respectively). The Chinese scholars before Karlgren only tried to reconstruct the "rime categories" (韻部) of Middle and Old Chinese, i.e. the phonological properties, not the phonetic values. Karlgren also suggested that at the very earliest stage recoverable, the personal pronouns were declined for case.

Indeed, 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 none the less 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, historical linguistics have moved beyond his original findings and Karlgren also failed to keep up with many new developments in the field.^[2] Nevertheless, Karlgren's pathbreaking works laid the foundation of modern Chinese historical linguistics and many of his works are still used as valuable works of reference.^[3]

[edit] Selected works

• Études sur la phonologie chinoise. 1915-1926.
• Ordet och Pennan i Mittens Rike, 1918, adapted as Sound and Symbol in Chinese, Oxford, 1923.
• Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese 1923.
• "The Authenticity of Ancient Chinese Texts", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1929.
• "The Early History of the Chou Li and Tso Chuan Texts", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1931.
• "Word Families in Chinese", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1933.
• "New Studies on Chinese Bronzes", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1937.
• "Grammata Serica, Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1940.
• "Huai and Han", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1941.
• "Glosses on the Kuo Feng Odes", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1942.
• "Glosses on the Siao Ya Odes", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1944.
• "Glosses on the Ta Ya and Sung Odes", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1946.
• "Legends and Cults in Ancient China", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1946.
• "The Book of Documents", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1950.
• "Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1954.
• Grammata Serica Recensa. 1957

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

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Bernhard Karlgren. "Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese." Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern antiquities, no. 26 (1954): 211-367.
2. ^ William H. Baxter, A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992).
3. ^ Lothar von Falkenhausen. Review of Göran Malmqvist, "Bernhard Karlgren: Ett forskarporträtt". China Review International 8, no. 1 (2001): 15-33.

[edit] Further reading

• Göran Malmqvist, Bernhard Karlgren: ett forskarporträtt [Bernhard Karlgren: Portrait of a Scholar], Stockholm: Norstedts. 1995. A biography of Karlgren with bibliography of his work.
• Hans Bielenstein, "Bernhard Karlgren (1889-1978)", Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 99, No. 3. (Jul. - Sep., 1979), p. 553. A brief obituary. Available through JSTOR.