Karlgren, Bernhard

The first scientific work was published at the age of 16, it was an article about a dialect of the Swedish province of Dalarna . In 1907-1909 studied at Uppsala University , where he specialized in Russian, became interested in comparative linguistics. Having decided to choose the then almost unexplored Chinese language, he transferred to St. Petersburg, studied the Chinese language with A. I. Ivanov (Chinese was not taught in Sweden). In the years 1910-1912. He lived in China, where he prepared a description of 24 provincial dialects.

In 1912, he moved to Paris, later to London, but finally decided to work in Uppsala. In 1915 he defended his doctoral dissertation (in French), but he wrote all his scientific works in English. In 1939, he replaced Johan Andersson as director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Östasiatiska Museet) in Stockholm, which he was in charge of until 1959. From 1929 to 1970, he was editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (BMFEA). Almost all of his works were published in this journal, or the museum’s book series.

Karlgren was the first scholar to use the methods of comparative historical linguistics in relation to the Chinese language. This allowed him to propose for the first time a reconstruction of the phonetics of ancient and Middle Chinese languages. During the reconstruction Karlgren did not pay attention to the phonological structure of the language, which is why some of his ideas were rejected by the scientific community ^[4] . Nevertheless, his works were the first in the field, and therefore they are still often referred to ^[5] .

• Études sur la phonologie chinoise . 1915-1926.
• Ordet och Pennan i Mittens Rike , 1918, adapted as Sound and Symbol in Chinese , Oxford, 1923. Reprinted 2007: Toronto: Global Language Press, ISBN 978-0-9738-9240-6 .
• Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese 1923.
• "The Authenticity of Ancient Chinese Texts", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , 1929.
• "The Early History of the Chou Li and Tso Chuan Texts", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , 1931.
• "Word Families in Chinese", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , 1933.
• New Studies on Chinese Bronzes, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , 1937.
• "Grammata Serica, Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , Stockholm, 1940.
• Huai and Han, The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , Stockholm, 1941.
• Glosses on the Kuo Feng Odes, The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , Stockholm, 1942.
• Glosses on the Siao Ya Odes, The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , Stockholm, 1944.
• Glosses on the Ta Ya and Sung Odes, The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , Stockholm, 1946.
• "Legends and Cults in Ancient China", The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , Stockholm, 1946.
• “The Book of Documents”, The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , Stockholm, 1950.
• Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese, The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities , Stockholm, 1954.
• Grammata Serica Recensa . 1957

In addition, he wrote many popular science works in Swedish on the history and culture of China, as well as three novels under the pseudonym Klas Gullman.

• William H. Baxter, A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992, pp. 3-4.
• Lothar von Falkenhausen. Review of Göran Malmqvist, "Bernhard Karlgren: Ett forskarporträtt". China Review International 8, no. 1 (2001): 15-33.
• Göran Malmqvist, Bernhard Karlgren: ett forskarporträtt [Bernhard Karlgren: Portrait of a Scholar], Stockholm: Norstedts. 1995. A biography of Karlgren with bibliography of his work.
• Hans Bielenstein, Bernhard Karlgren (1889-1978), Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 99, No. 3. (Jul. - Sep., 1979), p. 553. A brief obituary. Available through JSTOR.