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1. Developments up to World War II The early China scholars derived most of their knowledge from the reports of the Jesuit missionaries; without teachers and textbooks, they tried to acquire a command of the language. They were puzzled by the Chinese script which was considered related to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, a view that had some influence until the end of the 18th century. Scholarly language studies are connected with the rise of critical sinology at the beginning if the 19th century. The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), a veritable polymath who was also a forerun…

1. Early Life Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren (Chinese name Gāo Běnhàn 高本漢) was born in Jönköping on October 5, 1889, as one of the eight children (one of whom died in infancy) of Johannes Karlgren (1844–1905), a schoolteacher, and Gabriela Maria Hendrika (“Ella”) Hasselberg (1855–1935), from a family of clergymen, high-ranking civil servants and scholars. Johannes Karlgren was extraordinarily gifted in classical and modern languages and did his best to pass this gift on to his children. He had to …

Edwin George Pulleyblank was born into a family of school teachers on August 7, 1922 in Calgary, Canada. In 1939, he finished secondary education and attended the University of Alberta on a provincial government scholarship. He graduated in 1942, majoring in Latin and Greek Classics. With this linguistic background and a fondness of mathematics, supported by his father, a mathematics teacher, since childhood, Pulleyblank was then recruited to join the “Ultra” intelligence project in cryptanalysi…

China has a long lexicographic tradition that demonstrably goes back to the 1st century CE. The Shuōwén jiězì 說文解字 ( Explaining graphs and analyzing characters), compiled by Xǔ Shèn 許慎 and submitted to the throne in 121 CE, represents the prototype of a Chinese dictionary. As the first systematical work on written words, the Shuōwén played an important role for the elaboration of dictionaries in the Chinese writing world. It gathers a large number of characters (9,353 entries), for which it provides semantic glosses related to the Classics. The ent…