Ding Shengshu

Ding Shengshu a Chinese linguist of the twentieth century (1909-1998) who was a scholar of Chinese phonology, grammar and writing, and one of the leading figures in the study of the historical sound system and of ancient Chinese texts. His careful work on the language of the earliest recorded Chinese helped to place historical phonology on a stricter evidentiary basis.

Early Life and Education

Ding Shengshu was born in 1909 in eastern China, in a family that encouraged literary study. He received a strong training in the classical language and in traditional philology, including the analysis of the old dictionaries and rhyme books that preserve the pronunciation of earlier stages of Chinese. His ability to handle difficult texts with precision was evident from his student days and shaped the whole of his later career.

He entered university in the 1920s and studied Chinese language and literature, where he came into contact with the new approaches to language being introduced from Europe and America. He learned to combine the traditional philological skills of the Chinese scholar with the descriptive and historical methods of modern linguistics, and he acquired the habit of testing every hypothesis against the widest available range of evidence.

After graduating he began to teach and to carry out research, and he associated himself with the group of scholars who were attempting to reconstruct the language of antiquity and to describe the modern varieties systematically. In this formative period he worked on questions of pronunciation and of the relation between the sounds of the old poems and the categories recorded in the rhyme dictionaries.

Career and Academic Work

Ding held posts at several leading universities and research institutes, and he spent much of his career at the Institute of Linguistics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where he worked alongside colleagues in phonology, dialectology and lexicography. He took part in the large collaborative projects of the period, including surveys of dialects and the compilation of reference works on the history of the language.

He was a patient and exacting scholar who preferred to work on well-defined problems where the evidence could be mastered in full. He wrote relatively less than some of his contemporaries but what he published was closely argued and durable, and his careful reviews and critical notes helped to correct errors in the work of others and to raise the general standard of argument in the field.

As a teacher he trained a number of students who went on to work in historical phonology and in the study of early texts, passing on his insistence on evidence and his respect for the philological tradition. He also served as an editor of scholarly journals and reference series, where his judgement about what should be published and in what form influenced the development of the discipline.

Historical Phonology and Old Chinese

Ding's central contributions lie in the study of the older stages of Chinese and in the methods by which their sounds are recovered. He analysed the evidence of the earliest poetry, where the rhymes of the songs show which words sounded alike to the speakers of the time, and he showed how this evidence must be combined with the categories of the later rhyme dictionaries to yield a consistent account of the earlier sound system.

He was sceptical of reconstructions that multiplied hypothetical sounds beyond what the sources could support, and he argued for the greatest possible economy in the inventory of segments attributed to the earliest period. His method was to establish securely the correspondences among related words and among the modern varieties, and only then to propose the sounds that might have given rise to them, leaving uncertain cases marked as uncertain.

He also wrote on the relation between the structure of the earliest writing and the structure of the language it recorded, showing how the analysis of characters, and especially of the phonetic components of compound characters, provides independent evidence about pronunciation. This use of the writing system as a source for the history of speech was one of his distinctive contributions and is now a standard element of the field.

Grammar, Text and Writing

Beyond phonology Ding contributed to the study of the grammar of ancient Chinese, examining the functions of particles and the patterns of the simple sentence in early texts. He insisted that the description of the older language must rest on the full collection of instances of each form, since the small surviving corpus makes it easy to mistake a local or occasional usage for a general rule.

He edited and annotated classical texts, using his linguistic knowledge to explain obscure passages and to correct readings that had been distorted by copyists. This work of textual criticism depended on a firm grasp of how the language had changed, and it illustrated the mutual dependence of philology and linguistics: sound scholarship in one field repeatedly illuminated problems in the other.

He wrote as well on the reform and simplification of the writing system, taking part in the debates of his time about the relation between characters and the spoken language and about the best way to teach literacy. He held that any reform must rest on an accurate description of the existing system and of the needs of its users, and he brought the same sobriety to these practical questions that he brought to pure research.

Influence and Legacy

Ding's work on the sounds of the earliest Chinese, and his principled use of the writing system as linguistic evidence, placed historical phonology on a firmer footing and provided later scholars with both methods and cautionary lessons. His insistence on economy in reconstruction and on the full mastery of the evidence stands as a corrective to speculative systems that outrun the sources, and his critical writings continue to be cited.

Through his students and through his editorial work he shaped the standards of the field, and his combination of rigorous philology with modern linguistic method became a model for the historical study of the language. He also helped to preserve and make accessible important early texts, and his annotations are still consulted by readers who wish to understand difficult passages.

He died in 1998. He is remembered as one of the founders of modern Chinese linguistics, and especially as a scholar of the older language whose care, learning and intellectual honesty helped to turn the reconstruction of ancient pronunciation from a speculative art into a disciplined science grounded in the surviving evidence.

See also

• Old Chinese
• Chinese historical phonology
• Chinese characters
• Chinese philology