Annotations Indicating Pronunciation on Buddhist Texts
From: <thornt@u.washington.edu>
Date: Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 9:51 AM
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Dear List,
My name is Katherine Thornton and I am a graduate student at UW Seattle working on Sino-Vietnamese from a linguistic perspective.
I was wondering if anyone would be able to point me in the direction of any Buddhist texts that have been annotated with glosses on pronunciation? I am guessing that these would be texts in Chinese with phiên thiết (fan3 qie4) notations.
I have been working with Judith Henchy from the library but we haven't been able to turn anything up in the catalog.
Thanks!
Katherine
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From: Michele Thompson <thompson.michele@sbcglobal.net>
Date: 2008/10/26
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Katherine,
I apologize for taking so long to answer this. I was hoping that someone with a better answer than I have would respond to this question. In fact I don't actually have an answer but I do have a place for you to start looking for some texts that might fit what you need. The Di Sản Hán Nôm Việt Nam-Thư Mục Ðề Yếu; Catalogue Des Livres en Han Nom is a three-volume annotated bibliography of the holdings, up to 1987, in Chinese and Nôm, of the following institutions: Sino-Nom Institute of Hà Nội, École Française D' Extrême-Orient, Bibliothèque Nationale, Société Asiatique, École Des Langue Orientales, and Musée Guimet all in France. I know that the University of Washington has a copy of this. When I was trying to figure out which, and how many, texts on medicine and texts that had bits on medicine to look at during my own dissertation research I went through this whole 3 volume set quite carefully. This is not difficult but since there are listings for over 16,000 entries it is pretty time consuming. The good news is that the annotations in this collection are quite detailed and such things as writting in the margins etc is noted in many cases. If you choose to go through these volumes you will also find, I suspect, texts that are not listed as being primarily Buddhist but which contain something, even if not much, on Buddhism in them. In this manner I found quite a number of texts that are not listed as being primarily medical but which have some discussion of smallpox-the disease I was investigating. Other good news about using these volumes in this way is that the annotations also say where these texts, in some cases multiple copies of a given text, are held in the group of archives that collaborated to create the annotated bibliography. Also, once you have titles you can look and see if any of these texts are held in collections in the US, or you will be able to work on other ways to get yourself to where these texts are held or to bring them to you or even to ask someone to look and see if any annotations listed are annotations on pronunciation.
I apologize if you've already gone through these volumes and I'm sorry I don't have a better idea. Feel free to contact me, on or off list, if there is anything else I can help with.
cheers
Michele
Michele Thompson
Associate Professor
Dept. of History
Southern Connecticut State University
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From: Judith Henchy <judithh@u.washington.edu>
Date: 2008/10/28
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Michele,
We did look at the Di Sản, but it doesn't have the kind of description that Katherine needs to determine which texts might be annotated. On this topic, however, people might be interested to know that a searchable Thư Mục Hán Nôm is available online on the Viện Nghiên Cứu Hán Nôm website: http://www.hannom.org.vn/default.asp?CatID=131
Best
Judith
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From: Nhung Tuyet Tran <nhungtuyet.tran@utoronto.ca>
Date: Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 12:55 PM
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Dear Katherine,
You'll want to check with Dinh Khac Thuan (Institute of Han-Nom Studies) and Nguyen Nam (Harvard), both of whom are experts on Sino-Vietnamese/Nom and Buddhist texts. I can provide their email addresses off-list.
Best,
Nhung