The Qieyun is often used together with interpretations in Song dynasty rime tables such as the Yunjing, Qiyinlue, and the later Qieyun zhizhangtu and Sisheng dengzi.

At the time of Bernhard Karlgren's seminal work on Middle Chinese in the early 20th century, only fragments of the Qieyun were known, and scholars relied on the Guangyun ( 1008 ), a much expanded edition from the Song Dynasty.

Until the discovery of an almost complete early 8th century edition of the Qieyun in 1947, the Guangyun was the most accurate available account of the Qieyun phonology, and was heavily used in early work on the reconstruction of Middle Chinese.

Fragments of earlier revisions of the Qieyun were found early in the century among the Dunhuang manuscripts, in Turfan and in Beijing.

More narrowly, reconstructed " Middle Chinese " is usually based on the detailed phonetic evidence of the Qieyun rime dictionary from the late 6th century AD.

By the sixth century AD, systematic attempts were made to compile lists of all characters and specify their pronunciation by way of fanqie, culminating in rime dictionaries such as the Qieyun ( 601 AD ).

" At the present time most people in the field accept the views of the Chinese scholar Zhou Zumo " ( 周祖謨 ; 1914-1995 ) that Qieyun spellings were a north-south regional compromise between literary pronunciations from the Southern and Northern Dynasties.

However, significant sections of a version of the Qieyun itself were subsequently discovered in the caves of Dunhuang, and a complete copy of Wang Renxu's Kanmiu buque qieyun ( 706 ) from the Palace Library was found in 1947.

The use of fanqie was an important innovation of the Qieyun and allowed the pronunciation of all characters to be described exactly ; earlier dictionaries simply described the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters in terms of the most similar-sounding familiar character.

The Yunjing was created centuries after the Qieyun, and the authors of the Yunjing were attempting to interpret a phonological system that differed in significant ways from that of their own Late Middle Chinese ( LMC ) dialect.

The method was used by the Qieyun ( 切韻, " Cutting Rhymes "), a Chinese rhyme dictionary published in 601 AD during the Sui Dynasty.

When classical Chinese poetry flowered during the Tang Dynasty, the Qieyun became the authoritative source for literary pronunciations and it repeatedly underwent revisions and enlargements, the most important of which was the Guangyun ( 1007 – 1008 ).

The Qieyun, produced by Lù Fǎyán ( 陸法言 ) in 601, was a rime dictionary, serving as a guide to the recitation of literary texts and an aid in the composition of verse.

The děngyùnxué ( 等韻學 " study of classified rhymes ") was a more sophisticated analysis of the Qieyun pronunciations, initially developed by Chinese Buddhist monks who were studying Indian linguistics.

Edwin Pulleyblank has argued that the tables contain enough evidence to reconstruct the speech of that later period, which he calls this language Late Middle Chinese in contrast to the Early Middle Chinese of the Qieyun, and argues that it was the standard speech of the imperial capital Chang ' an in the late Tang dynasty.

The table below lists the combinations of initial and final classes that occur in the Qieyun, with the row of the rime tables in which each combination was placed:

The Qieyun preface describes how the book originated from discussions with eight of his friends at his home in Cháng ' ān, which was the Suì capital.

According to Lu, Yan Zhitui ( 顏之推 ) and Xiao Gai ( 蕭該 ), both men originally from the south, were the most influential in setting up the norms on which the Qieyun was based.

It was annotated in 677 by Zhāngsūn Nèyán ( 長孫訥言 ), revised and published in 706 by Wáng Renxu ( 王仁煦 ) as the Kanmiu Buque Qieyun ( 刊謬補缺切韻 ; " Corrected and supplemented Qieyun ), collated and republished in 751 by Sun Mian ( 孫愐 ) as the Tángyùn ( 唐韻 ; " Tang rimes "), and eventually incorporated into the still-extant Guǎngyùn and Jíyùn rime dictionaries from the Song Dynasty.

It is a revision and expansion of the influential Qieyun rime dictionary of 601, and was itself later revised as the Jiyun.

The most important rime dictionary was the Qieyun, published by Lù Fǎyán ( 陸法言 ) in 601, during the Sui Dynasty, based on five earlier rime dictionaries that are no longer extant.

The formula was followed by the character 反 fǎn ( in the Qieyun ) or the character 切 qiè ( in the Guangyun ), followed by the number of homophonous characters.

Karlgren himself had no direct access to the Qieyun, which was thought lost ; however, fragments of the Qieyun were discovered in the Dunhuang Caves in the 1930s, and a nearly complete copy was discovered in 1947 in the Palace Museum.

Branches of the Chinese family such as Mandarin Chinese ( including Standard Chinese, based on the speech of Beijing ), Yue Chinese and Wu Chinese can be largely treated as divergent developments from the Qieyun system.

The Qieyun did not directly record Middle Chinese as a spoken language, but rather how Chinese characters should be pronounced.

The Qieyun ( 601 AD ), is the oldest of the rime dictionaries and the main source for the pronunciation of characters in Early Middle Chinese ( EMC ).

The Yunjing ( c. 1150 AD ) is the oldest of the so-called rime tables, which provide a more detailed phonological analysis of the system contained in the Qieyun.

Middle Chinese (), formerly known as Ancient Chinese is the system of Chinese pronunciation contained in the Qieyun, a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions.

The 12th-century Yunjing and other rime tables incorporate a more sophisticated and convenient analysis of the Qieyun phonology.

The rime tables attest to a number of sound changes that had occurred over the centuries following the publication of the Qieyun.

Linguists sometimes refer to the system of the Qieyun as Early Middle Chinese and the variant revealed by the rime tables as Late Middle Chinese.

The most important of these is the Qieyun rime dictionary ( 601 AD ) and its revisions.

A rime table or rhyme table () is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the Qieyun ( 601 ) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties.

In the medieval rime dictionaries, characters were organized into rhyme groups ( yùn 韵 ), with 193 groups in the Qieyun, growing to 206 in the Guangyun.

The rime tables were compiled centuries later in the time of a new standard, and many of the distinctions in the Qieyun would have been meaningless to the compilers.

The Qieyun () is a Chinese rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui Dynasty.

The structure of the Qieyun would become the model for subsequent rime dictionaries.

The most important rime dictionary tradition began with the Qieyun ( 601 ), which aimed to reconcile the literary reading traditions and poetic practice of north and south China.

The Yunjing is organized into 43 tables, each covering several Qieyun rhyme classes, and classified as:

Li Rong, in a systematic comparison of the rhyme tables with a recently discovered early edition of the Qieyun, identified seven classes of finals.

This led to rime tables such as the Yunjing ( c. 1150 AD ), a sophisticated analysis of the sound system of the Qieyun.

* Rime dictionaries and rime tables of the Middle Chinese era, such as the Qieyun ( 601 AD ) and Yunjing ( c. 1150 AD ).