A formalized statement of traditional terminology in Middle Chinese phonology

Ever since its birth in the pre-linguistic period, traditional Chinese phonology has contributed essentially to the study, both philological and linguistic, of historical Chinese phonology; nevertheless, a systematic retrospect of this academic custom from the pure perspective of linguistics remains largely blank. Concentrating on classical philological resources, this essay works out a clearly defined set of terminology with little dependence on the phonetic natures of these units, which may serve as an evaluative metric on the phonological reconstruction of Middle Chinese as well as a review of the long-ignored academic tradition of phonological studies in ancient Chinese philology.