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Yuen Ren Society Treasury of Chinese Dialect Data

Founding

The Yuen Ren Society Treasury of Chinese Dialect Data () is the journal of the Yuen Ren Society, an organization for the promotion of Chinese dialect fieldwork founded in 1990 by David Prager Branner.

Notable contributions

There have been three volumes of the Treasury published to date, featuring scholarship by prominent linguists such as Jerry Norman, W. South Coblin, Âng Uî-jîn 洪惟仁, Lǐ Róng 李榮, Jerold Edmondson, and Richard VanNess Simmons, among others.

The Treasury has specialized in publishing records of highly distinctive Mǐn dialects spoken in rural regions of Fújiàn Province or in little-known villages of Taiwan. These records, of linguistic fieldwork conducted with informants as long ago as the 1970s, document unique living forms of Chinese not otherwise recorded and in many cases now no longer possible to record. In the particular case of Mǐn dialects, records of this kind are the sole descriptive linguistic basis for the study of spoken Chinese pre-dating the Middle Chinese era, since Mǐn dialects retain linguistic features from an era much older than common ancestor of the other dialect groups.

Mǐn dialect sites covered include:

The Treasury also published records of little-known dialects in other regions of the Chinese-speaking world, in Guǎngxī 廣西, Zhèjiāng 浙江, and elsewhere, along with newly collected data from better-established dialects, such as Fúzhōu 福州, Xīníng 西寧, Hong Kong, Héngyáng 衡陽, Nántōng 南通, Běijīng, and others, as well as Míng-Qīng guānhuà 明清官話. The Treasury is unusual in concentrating on dialect data, as the great majority of linguistic journals tend to emphasize analysis and discussion, relegating data to a lesser place.

References

Bibliography

  • . Appeared as "Lǐ Róng xù 李榮序" in The Yuen Ren Society Treasury of Chinese Dialect Data 元任學會漢語方言資料寶庫 (II: 5–6), with English translation by David Prager Branner. Chinese text also reprinted in Lǐ Róng 李榮, Fāngyán cúngǎo 方言存稿 (BěijÄ«ng 北京: Shāngwù YìnshÅ« Guǎn 商務印書館, 2012), p. 35.

External links