1887
Volume 26, Issue 4
  • ISSN 1606-822X
  • E-ISSN: 2309-5067

Abstract

Abstract

Large annotated corpora of Chinese rhymed poetry have recently become available, in part due to the development of automatic annotation techniques, such as Baley (2022). The availability of such annotated corpora makes possible the computer-assisted analysis of rhyming practices from a diachronic point of view. This paper proposes to couple such annotated rhymed corpora with the China Biographical Database (CBDB) (2021) to assign individual poems to different time periods and, re-using the concept of rhyme communities, to apply community evolution algorithms in order to follow the changes in the composition of rhyme communities. In the process, I demonstrate that it is possible to highlight rhyme splits and mergers and date those changes. This further allows us to look at sequences of mergers and establish the corresponding chronology of the phonological changes. The code is published so that the approach can be replicated for other periods of the Chinese corpus and adapted to other languages.

Available under the CC BY 4.0 license.
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2025-07-28
2026-04-17
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): automated detection; Chinese rhymes; Middle Chinese phonology; phonological change
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