A
rime table or
rhyme table is a Chinese
phonological model, tabulating the
syllables of the series of
rime dictionaries beginning with the
Qieyun (601) by their
onsets,
rhyme groups,
tones and other properties. The method gave a significantly more precise and systematic account of the sounds of those dictionaries than the previously used
fanqiè analysis, but many of its details remain obscure. The phonological system that is implicit in the rime dictionaries and analysed in the rime tables is known as
Middle Chinese, and is the traditional starting point for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. Some authors distinguish the two layers as Early and Late Middle Chinese respectively.