1959/06/01 by G. B. Downera · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Chinese history and philosophy #Cognate #Tone (literature) #Linguistics #Word (group theory) #Psychology #Philosophy
paper · doi:10.1017/s0041977x00068701
openalex publication_date 1959/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Since Karlgren's ‘Word families’ first drew attention to the existence of large groups of cognate words in classical Chinese, efforts have been made to define more closely the principal phonetic contrasts involved, and to find semantic relationships that would correspond regularly to the phonetic contrasts. Karlgren himself came to the conclusion that in general it was impossible to find any regular semantic or grammatical correlations with the phonetic correspondence, and that Archaic Chinese showed only the last vestiges of a former inflectional system.