ABSTRACT

Who were they? You may have wondered aŌer reading the Ɵtle of this chapter. They were the Chinese people during the Middle Chinese period, especially the Tang Dynasty. Poetry was such an important aspect of life, and also a high form of literary art during the Tang Dynasty, that many of the most celebrated poets in the Chinese culture were from this era. The Tang Dynasty however is more than a thousand years from our Ɵme. Would it not be wonderful to read the Tang poetry in their original sounds? To do so, we would need to know the phonology of Middle Chinese.