Bernhard Karlgren

Bernhard Karlgren (1889 - 1978) was a Swedish sinologist and eminent philologist, and the founder of Swedish sinology as a scholarly discipline. His full name was Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren, and his Chinese penname is 高本漢 (Gao Benhan).

Karlgren studied at Uppsala University between 1907-1909, where he majored in Russian under Professor J. A. Lundell, a Slavicist interested in comparative phonology, and decided that he wanted to apply the methods of comparative historical phonology to Chinese, which had not yet been so studied. Since Chinese was not yet taught in Sweden, Karlgren went St. Petersburg after Uppsala, where he studied Chinese with Professor A. I. Ivanoff for two months. In 1910-1912, Karlgren lived in China, where he studied Chinese and collected materials for a phonological description of 24 dialects.

He returned to Europe in January 1912, spending a few months in London, then studying in Paris from September 1912 to April 1914 under Professor Edouard Chavannes (1865–1918). Karlgren's 1915 doctoral dissertation from Uppsala University — the first part of his monumental Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise — attempted to reconstruct the pronunciation of some three thousand characters in what he termed Ancient Chinese, i.e. the language codified in the Qieyun 切韻 dictionary published in A.D. 601. This effort continued after his dissertation, and the final part of his Etudes appeared in 1926. (Although his dissertation was written in French, most of his subsequent scholarly works were in English.)

In 1918, Karlgren was appointed Professor of East Asian Philology at the University of Gothenburg, where he taught Chinese and Japanese. In 1922 he visited China for the second and last time. He left Gothenburg in 1939 for Stockholm, where he became Director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities and editor of its Bulletin, in which he published many of his most important writings.

In 1946, Karlgren began a far-reaching and ultimately successful attack on the then rather loosely argued historiography of ancient China. Reviewing the literature on China's pre-Han history in his article Legends and Cults in Ancient China, he pointed out that "a common feature to most of these treatises is a curious lack of critical method in the handling of the material". In particular, Karlgren criticised the unselective use of documents from different ages when reconstructing China's ancient history. "In this way very full and detailed accounts have been arrived at - but accounts that are indeed caricatures of scientifically established ones." Over time Karlgren's critique has prevailed, and newer Chinese history is on a much firmer foundation as a result.

Karlgren was first to use European-style principles of historical linguistics to study the Chinese language, and reconstructed the phonetics of what is now called Middle Chinese, as well as the phonetics of Old Chinese. He also suggested that at the very earliest stage recoverable, the personal pronouns were inflected for case.

Indeed, Karlgren attempted to unearth Chinese history itself from its linguistic development and diffusion. In this he is remarkably contemporary. As he writes in his English adaptation Sound and Symbol in Chinese (1923), Chapter I: "Thus, though Chinese traditions give no hint whatever of an immigration from any foreign country, and though there consequently is no external chronological point d'appui, we are none the less able to state, from internal evidence, that the Chinese tradition which places the reign of the emperor Yao in the twenty-fourth century B.C. is correct; that the Chinese even in those remote times were skilled astronomers; that they put down in writing in the Chinese language records of memorable events, and in all probability wrote their accouunts soon after the events; in short, that a well-developed Chinese civilization--resting undoubtedly on foundations many centuries old--together with the Chinese language, existed on Chinese soil two thousand years before Christ."

Although his pioneering work was important in many ways, much of it has been made outdated by advances in both theory and application, as well as the greater availability of relevant data.

Selected works

• Études sur la phonologie chinoise. 1915-1926.
• Ordet och Pennan i Mittens Rike, 1918, adapted as Sound and Symbol in Chinese, Oxford, 1923.
• Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese 1923.
• The Authenticity of Ancient Chinese Texts, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1929.
• The Early History of the Chou Li and Tso Chuan Texts, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1931.
• Word Families in Chinese, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1933.
• New Studies on Chinese Bronzes, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1937.
• Grammata Serica, Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese, from The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1940.
• Huai and Han, from The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1941.
• Glosses on the Kuo Feng Odes, from The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1942.
• Glosses on the Siao Ya Odes, from The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1944.
• Glosses on the Ta Ya and Sung Odes, from The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1946.
• Legends and Cults in Ancient China, from The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1946.
• The Book of Documents, from The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1950.
• Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese, from The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1954.
• Grammata Serica Recensa. 1957

In Swedish he published numerous popular works on Chinese language, culture and history. In the 1940's, he published three novels under the pen name Klas Gullman.

For further reading

• Göran Malmqvist, Bernhard Karlgren: ett forskarporträtt [Bernhard Karlgren: Portrait of a Scholar], Stockholm: Norstedts. 1995. A biography of Karlgren with bibliography of his work.de:Bernhard Karlgren

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