This guide collects search sites for research on Japanese vocabulary and Sino-Japanese words — above all sites built in China — so that they can be surveyed at a glance and searched with ease.
Finding prior research
A registration-based paper search site; a database holding the full text of major Chinese journals.
Dictionaries
The following sites help when tracing the sources of Sino-Japanese words.
A general dictionary site, weighted toward modern Chinese.
Full-text search of the English–Chinese dictionaries in its collection.
Note: 四库全书电子版 and 台湾中央研究院网站 can be hard to reach at times.
Corpora
Peking University and BLCU corpora
Taiwan: Academia Sinica corpora
Document databases
Search and reference sites
顧國林 — 古音小鏡www.kaom.net
A site that even specialists in Chinese praise highly — probably the richest search tool in the field anywhere online. It gathers the classical texts and other materials needed for Chinese historical linguistics: rime-book and character-dictionary search, Chinese dialectology, historical phonology (reconstructions by fourteen scholars for Middle Chinese and seven for Old Chinese, rhyme data from the Shijing, Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and Sino-Vietnamese readings), paleography (bamboo and wooden slip texts), historical linguistics (cognate dictionaries and neighboring languages such as Tibetan, Mongolic, Manchu, Kam–Tai, and Hmong), toponymy, and more. It also carries useful tools such as an IPA input method and statistics.
复旦大学中华文明数据中心・复旦大学东亚语言数据中心ccdc.fudan.edu.cn
Covers Middle and Old Chinese phonology, and its dialect maps are the highlight: users can build their own, so many maps of real interest exist. Detailed field-survey data is also available.
A site founded by several Taiwanese institutions, offering search over paleography, phonology, and exegesis resources.
Registration required; whether it charges is unclear. With a collection of over twenty thousand Chinese classical texts and sixty dictionaries, from modern ones to calligraphy dictionaries, searchable across more than two hundred thousand characters, it is the richest dictionary and classical-text site on the Chinese internet.
Dialects
Premodern texts and excavated documents
Historical phonology and character readings
A site devoted to shi and ci poetry and other verse, with a poetry database and search and detection of rhyme and tonal patterns.
Carries photographic reproductions and reconstructed readings of the essential phonological classics — the Guangyun, Zhongyuan Yinyun, Hongwu Zhengyun Jian, and Fenyun Cuoyao — with very convenient search.
References
- 于拙 (2023). “中国語関係オンライン・ツールまとめ：音韻・文字・訓詁” (in Japanese)
Acknowledgments
This guide is part of research results funded by the following project:
Gakushuin University Computer Centre, 2024 Special Research Project
「古典日本語連語表現の検索コンコーダンスシステムの拡張と応用研究」
(Lead: 安部清哉; research collaboration and implementation: 于拙)