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Classical Chinese is unique among classical languages because it is usually romanized with modern Mandarin readings, whereas no one romanizes Classical Greek using modern Greek pronunciation. This anachronistic practice reflects a lack of consensus on the phonology of pre-modern Chinese. Scholars unable to reconstruct Chinese on their own have turned to Bernhard Karlgren's Grammata Serica Recensa (Stockholm, 1957) for over half a century as a source of Old and Middle Chinese readings. However, Karlgren's reconstructions have long been outdated, and his various successors all have conflicting proposals. How can a non-specialist find reconstructions that are current and yet not dependent on transient, proprietary hypotheses?
Axel Schuessler's Companion offers an affordable and easily accessible solution to this problem. It is more than just a companion to Karlgren's classic; it is an update with a 44-page introduction to the world of traditional Chinese phonological analysis and its modern interpretations. It could be a mini-textbook for a course on early Chinese phonology. Schuessler explains in lay-friendly terms how he and others came up with their reconstructions while also pointing out areas of controversy.
It is difficult to write a single text that appeals to both linguists and non-linguists on the one hand and to Sinologists and non-Sinologists on the other. Schuessler deftly walks this tightrope, though at moments he might assume knowledge that non-linguists and/or non-Sinologists might not have. For instance, he does not explicitly identify the...