Fangyan (book)
The Fangyan is a Chinese dictionary compiled in the early 1st century CE by the poet and philosopher Yang Xiong. It was the first Chinese dictionary to include significant regional vocabulary, and is considered the "most significant lexicographic work" of its era. His dictionary's preface explains how he spent 27 years amassing and collating the dictionary. Yang collected regionalisms from many sources, particularly the 'light carriage' surveys made during the Zhou and Qin dynasties, where imperial emissaries were sent into the countryside annually to record folk songs and idioms from across China, reaching as far north as Korea.
Contents
The Fangyan originally contained some 9,000 characters in 15 chapters, but two chapters have since been lost.Definitions typically list regional synonyms. For example, the entry for hu is as follows:
虎：陳魏宋楚之間或謂之李父；江淮南楚之間謂之李耳，或謂之於菟．自關東西或謂之伯都．
Tiger: in the regions of Chen-Wei Song-Chu, some call it lifu; in the regions of Jiang-Huai Nan-Chu, they call it li'er, and some call it wutu. From the Pass, east- and west-ward, some call it also bodu.
Comparative linguists have used dialect data from the Fangyan in reconstructing the pronunciation of Eastern Han Chinese, which is an important diachronic stage between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese. In the above example, Paul Serruys reconstructs 'tiger' as Old Chinese. Serruys also applied the techniques of modern dialectology to the distribution of regional words, identifying dialect areas and their relationships.