Bernhard Karlgren

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Bernhard Karlgren (15 October 1889, Jönköping - 20 October 1978) was a Swedish sinologist, philologist, and the founder of Swedish sinology as a scholarly discipline. His full name was Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren, and he adopted the Chinese name "Gao Ben Han". Karlgren published his first scholarly article at the age of 16 on the dialect of the province of Dalarna. Later he studied at Uppsala University from 1907-1909, where he majored in Russian under Professor J. A. Lundell, a Slavicist interested in comparative phonology, and decided that he wanted to apply the methods of comparative historical phonology to Chinese, which had not yet been so studied. Since Chinese was not yet taught in Sweden, Karlgren went to St. Petersburg, where he studied Chinese with Professor A. I. Ivanoff for two months. In 1910-1912, Karlgren lived in China, where he studied Chinese and prepared phonological descriptions of 24 distinct dialects.