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In the introduction to his Word Families in Chinese (1934:1), Bernhard Karlgren wrote: “it stands to reason that Chinese does not consist of so and so many thousands of independent monosyllables, none of them cognate to any others; in Chinese, as in all other languages, the words form families, groups of cognate words formed from one and the same primary stem”. In the same text, Karlgren also articulated the notion that in comparing Chinese with related languages, word stems, not words per se, are the appropriate objects of comparison. Karlgren’s Word Families assembled sets of words which resembled one another more or less closely in both Karlgren’s reconstructed Old Chinese (OC) pronunciation and in meaning: for instance xíng 行, Karlgren’s *g’ăng ‘to walk, to go’; huáng 徨, Karlgren’s *g’wâŋ ‘to go to and fro’; wáng 往, Karlgren’s *gi̭wang ‘to walk, go’; jiē 街, Karlgren’s *…

1. Background Broadly speaking, Old Chinese phonology ( Shànggǔ yīn 上古音) is the sound system of Old Chinese, the language of the early first millennium BCE that underlies the rhymes (=rimes) of the Shījīng 詩經 (the Book …