The project has brought together a majority, if not most, of the world’s leading scholars in classical Chinese philology and linguistics for intensive collaboration in Oslo. The year at CAS was a part of a larger project titled Synonyma Serica Comparata (SSC). It is a Scandinavian-based joint project between Peking University and the University of Oslo, with active participation of specialists from several other universities.

SSC is a contribution to cognitive linguistics in a historical perspective. In several representative handbooks on cognitive science, there is almost a total absence of perspectives of cultural and linguistic history, and the absence is symptomatic. Within the cognitive schemes of cognitive linguistics, there is ample room for evolutionary biological history, but there is remarkably little room for cultural history.

In order to reconstruct with any precision the differences between cultures, we need comparable and sufficiently different cultures for contrastive study. And in order to reconstruct and analyse with any precision the depth of historical change in cognitive strategies and conceptual schemes, one needs a sufficiently varied and well documented long timespan to be compared.

The present database concentrates on the case of China and the classical Chinese language from 1300 BC to 200 AD. At the present stage, most work has been done on the ancient period, and this work has been done on the assumption that in order to understand a meaning of a classical Chinese word one must determine exactly how it differs from its synonyms within the same sematic field, and how exactly it contrasts or semantically interacts with related words like antonyms, standard epithets and the like. A good dictionary of classical Chinese must therefore be an analytic dictionary of synonyms and antonyms, arranged in natural cognitive groupings which we may call synonym groups. In addition, it must take adequate note of the etymology of the words, based on historical phonology, as well as the secondary graphic etymology of Chinese characters, based on historical epigraphy. In order to achieve these basic needs, a fairly complex relational database is needed.

Much more progress was made on the database than one could have hoped for during the year at CAS. 900 synonym groups have been defined in detail, a considerable number of texts were analysed and discussed in detail. All these results were entered into the database and are now accessible by server to a group of collaborators all over the world.