Towards a standardized annotation of rhyme judgments in Chinese historical phonology (and beyond)

Abstract

Although rhyme analysis plays a crucial role in the reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology, the field has not yet developed a standardized annotation framework for rhyme judgments applied to Ancient Chinese texts. Building on initial attempts to standardize crosslinguistic data for the purpose of historical and typological language comparison (as part of the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative), we present a proposal for consistent and transparent rhyme annotation. This proposal allows scholars to annotate the rhymes they identify in historical texts in such a way that the judgments can be analyzed with computational tools as well as conveniently inspected by scholars. Our framework is accompanied by software tools and exemplary datasets, which were annotated by various scholars, and reflect not only Chinese, but also contemporary poetry in different languages. In the paper, we present the framework and also point to caveats and current insufficiencies in annotation. In doing so, we hope to inspire more scholars working on Old Chinese reconstruction to share their judgments, allowing others working in the field to improve, revise, and analyze them.