WongAvery Collection of Chinese Materials : 欽定同文韻統

WongAvery Collection of Chinese Materials

<p style='text-align: justify;'>"[Emperor Qianlong] regarded the Manchu script as the benchmark of phonetic accuracy in his own polyglot projects. Early in his reign he commissioned the foundation for all later official systems of standardized multilingual transcription, the <i>Tongwen yuntong</i>. Using tables and glosses, the book systematically gave Chinese equivalents to letter combinations found in Tibetan and Sanskrit (<i>Tianzhu zimu</i>, written in the Lan-tsha script common in Tibet). Since Chinese characters, as single syllables, could not precisely represent the complex consonant clusters found in Tibetan and Sanskrit, the book’s editors devised a system of combining up to three Chinese characters into a single compound 'character' that, if pronounced as a single syllable according to certain rules, would theoretically mimic the multi-consonant syllables of other languages."</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Matthew Mosca, <i>From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: the Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China</i> (Stanford University Press, 2013), 72-3.</p>