A database of qù-tone alternations in Ancient Chinese

<ns3:p> Alternations in the entering tone ( <ns3:italic>qù</ns3:italic> -tone) in Ancient Chinese have for a long time fascinated scholars, since they seem to give hint to relics of morphology in the history of Chinese, contrasting strongly with the isolating structure of all modern varieties of Chinese. Here we present a transparently assembled collection of entering tone alternations in the history of Chinese, derived from Lù Démíngs historical annotation of the classics, the Jīngdiǎn Shìwén, which gives early hints on such alternations by means of historical <ns3:italic>fǎnqiè</ns3:italic> spellings. The database is available in two flavors. On the one hand, it can be accessed through a web interface that allows interested users to browse through the data in linked form. On the other hand, the data is available in the formats recommended by the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative. This format does not only offer quick programmatic access to experienced users, but is also specifically apt for the purpose of archiving the data. In the study, we illustrate how the data was assembled and curated, and illustrate how the data can be put to concrete use. </ns3:p>