Bernhard Karlgren | |||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Born | (1889-10-15)15 October 1889 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Died | 20 October 1978(1978-10-20) (aged 89) Stockholm, Sweden | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Alma mater | Uppsala University | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Known for | Pioneering reconstructions ofMiddle Chinese andOld Chinese | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Scientific career | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Fields | Ancient Chinese linguistics, literature | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Institutions | Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities University of Gothenburg | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Academic advisors | Johan August Lundell | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Notable students | Hans Bielenstein Göran Malmqvist | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 高本漢 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 高本汉 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Hanyu Pinyin | Gāo Běnhàn | ||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||
Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren (Swedish pronunciation:[ˈbæ̌ːɳaɖˈkɑ̂ːɭɡreːn]; 15 October 1889 – 20 October 1978) was a Swedishsinologist andlinguist who pioneered the study ofChinesehistorical phonology using moderncomparative methods. In the early 20th century, Karlgren conducted large surveys of thevarieties of Chinese and studied historical information on rhyming in ancient Chinese poetry, then used them to create the first ever completereconstructions of what are now calledMiddle Chinese andOld Chinese.
Bernhard Karlgren was born on 15 October 1889 inJönköping,Sweden. His father, Johannes Karlgren, taughtLatin,Greek, andSwedish at the local high school.[1] Karlgren showed ability in linguistics from a young age, and was interested in Sweden's dialects and traditional folk stories.[2] He mastered classical languages and was an accomplished translator of Greek poetry into his native language. He displayed an early interest in China, and wrote a drama,The White Hind, set in that country in his early teens.[3] His first scholarly article, a phonetic transcription, based on a system devised byJohan August Lundell, of traditional folk stories from his native province ofSmåland, was completed when he was 14,[4] and published in 1908 when he was only 18 years old.[5] He studied Russian atUppsala University underJohan August Lundell, a Slavicist interested incomparative linguistics. He graduated in 1909 with a bachelor's degree in Nordic, Greek, and Slavonic languages.[6] Although he initially intended to specialize in theScandinavian languages, on the advice of his elder brother Anton Karlgren (1882–1973) he decided to focus on Chinese instead,[7] attracted to it also by the fact that, as Lundell had told him, Chinese contained a great number of dialects.[8] He departed for St. Petersburg, which, under the guidance ofVasily Vasilyev, had created one of the major European centres for the study of Chinese. While there, Karlgren, studying underA. I. Ivanov, won a grant to studyChinese dialects, even though he had no background in Chinese at that point.[2]
Karlgren lived in China from 1910 to 1912. He achieved basic fluency and literacy after only a few months of study, and prepared a questionnaire of 3,100Chinese characters to gather information on Chinese dialects.[2] After his grant money ran out, Karlgren supported himself by teaching French and, famously, English, which, according to one anecdote, he had never been taught but had picked up from English-speaking passengers on the ship from Europe to China.[9] In fact he had received a high credit in English in his final High School exams.[10] He eventually gathered data on 19 differentMandarin dialects, as well asShanghainese, theFuzhou dialect ofEastern Min, andCantonese, plus theVietnamese andJapanese pronunciations of the characters in his questionnaire.[9]
Karlgren returned to Europe in January 1912, first staying in London, then in Paris, before arriving inUppsala in his home country of Sweden, where in 1915 he produced his doctoral dissertation, "Études sur la phonologie chinoise" ("Studies on Chinese Phonology"). Although his dissertation was written in French, most of his subsequent scholarly works were in English. After obtaining his doctorate, Karlgren taught at theUniversity of Gothenburg, serving as its rector from 1931 to 1936.
In 1939, Karlgren succeededJohan Gunnar Andersson as director of theMuseum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Östasiatiska Museet), a post he held until 1959. This public museum was founded in 1926 on Andersson's pioneering discoveries of prehistoric archaeology made in China in the 1920s, and later expanded to cover later periods as well as other parts of Asia. Karlgren had been in close contact with Andersson for many years, and also succeeded Andersson as editor of the museum's journal, theBulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (BMFEA, 1929–) and continued in this position until the 1970s. Karlgren himself first published many of his own major works in this annual journal, or as books in the monograph series of the museum.
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 articleLegends 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."[11]
In 1950, Karlgren was inducted into theRoyal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.[12]
Karlgren died on 20 October 1978 inStockholm at age 89.
Karlgren was the first scholar to use European-style principles ofhistorical linguistics to study the Chinese language. He was also the first to reconstruct the sounds of what are now calledMiddle Chinese andOld Chinese (what he called "Ancient Chinese" and "Archaic Chinese" respectively). Karlgren suggested that at the very earliest stage recoverable, the personal pronouns weredeclined for case.
Karlgren attempted to unearth Chinese history itself from its linguistic development and diffusion. As he writes in his English adaptationSound 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 chronologicalpoint d'appui, we are nonetheless able to state, from internal evidence, that the Chinese tradition which places the reign of theemperor 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 of historical Chinese linguistics, Karlgren's original findings have been surpassed. Today the phonological systems proposed by Karlgren have largely been superseded, as their weaknesses are obvious: "Karlgren saw himself as reconstructing phonetics, not phonology, and paid little attention to phonological structure. As a result, the systems he reconstructed often lack the symmetry and pattern which are in the phonological systems of natural languages."[13] Nevertheless, Karlgren's groundbreaking works laid the foundation of modern Chinese historical linguistics and many of his works are still used as works of reference.[14]
Commander Grand Cross of theOrder of the Polar Star (23 November 1961)[15]In Swedish he published numerous popular works on Chinese language, culture and history. In the 1940s, he published three novels under the pen name Klas Gullman.
