Description
Book SynopsisThis is the fourth volume in Professor Dobson's pioneering researches into the nature and development of Classical Chinese. The first volume, Late Archaic Chinese, appeared in 1959 and laid the foundations for a systematic and scientific study of the grammar of Classical Chinese. It described specifically the language of the 4th-3rd centuries B.C. The second volume, Early Archaic Chinese, published in 1962, described the language of the 11th and 10th centuries B.C. through the decipherment of a corpus of bronze inscriptions hitherto imperfectly understood. Late Han Chinese, the third volume, appeared in 1964. In this volume the inquiry was carried into the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. and the shift from Archaic to Classical Chinese was studied. In this, the fourth volume, the language of the Book of Songs, a classic anthology of verse, is analysed and described.
The Book of Songs uniquely provides data from the 9th and 8th centuries
