Coblin (Chinese, U. of Iowa) presents a practical introduction to the study of 'Phags-pa Chinese, the earliest form of the Chinese language to be written in a systematically devised alphabetic script;
The objective of the work of W. South Coblin has been to collect various materials on Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages into a single list and to arrange this list in a clear and convenient form, wi
The core of the work is a systematically arranged listing of 2,558 sound glosses and 345 Buddhist transcriptions. Chinese characters in each entry are supplied with Middle Chinese and Eastern Han reco
In Chinese, as in many languages with long written histories, textual sources tend to reflect koines or reginal lingua francas rather than dialects as such. The recording of ordinary regional vernacul
