19 Facts About Bernhard Karlgren

Bernhard Karlgren was born on 15 October 1889 in Jonkoping, Sweden.

Bernhard Karlgren showed ability in linguistics from a young age, and was interested in Sweden's dialects and traditional folk stories.

Bernhard Karlgren mastered classical languages and was an accomplished translator of Greek poetry into his native language.

Bernhard Karlgren displayed an early interest in China, and wrote a drama, The White Hind, set in that country in his early teens.

Bernhard Karlgren graduated in 1909 with a bachelor's degree in Nordic, Greek, and Slavonic languages.

Bernhard Karlgren departed for St Petersburg, which, under the guidance of Vasily Vasilyev, had created one of the major European centres for the study of Chinese.

Bernhard Karlgren achieved basic fluency and literacy after only a few months of study, and prepared a questionnaire of 3,100 Chinese characters to gather information on Chinese dialects.

Bernhard Karlgren eventually gathered data on 19 different Mandarin dialects, as well as Shanghainese, the Fuzhou dialect of Eastern Min, and Cantonese, plus the Vietnamese and Japanese pronunciations of the characters in his questionnaire.

Bernhard Karlgren returned to Europe in January 1912, first staying in London, then in Paris, before arriving in Uppsala in his home country of Sweden, where in 1915 he produced his doctoral dissertation, "".

In 1939, Bernhard Karlgren succeeded Johan Gunnar Andersson as director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, a post he held until 1959.

Bernhard Karlgren had been in close contact with Andersson for many years, and succeeded Andersson as editor of the museum's journal, the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities and continued in this position until the 1970s.

In 1946, Bernhard Karlgren began a far-reaching attack on the then rather loosely argued historiography of ancient China.

In particular, Bernhard Karlgren criticised the unselective use of documents from different ages when reconstructing China's ancient history.

In 1950, Bernhard Karlgren was inducted into the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Bernhard Karlgren died on 20 October 1978 in Stockholm at age 89.

Bernhard Karlgren was the first scholar to use European-style principles of historical linguistics to study the Chinese language.

Bernhard Karlgren was the first to reconstruct the sounds of what are now called Middle Chinese and Old Chinese.

Bernhard Karlgren suggested that at the very earliest stage recoverable, the personal pronouns were declined for case.

Bernhard Karlgren attempted to unearth Chinese history itself from its linguistic development and diffusion.