Sinitic — The Sinologist

The Sinologist — the classical Chinese written world and its phonological deep past.

Literary and classical Chinese with its reconstruction instruments: Kanripo and CBETA, TLS, Baxter-Sagart and the Qieyun-system database, Unihan, the Heian hanzi dictionaries, the UD lzh treebanks, SuttaCentral’s Agamas, the kaikki zh extract riding wiktionary-recon — the Đại Việt classical shelf (the sinographic cosmopolis reaching Vietnam, as sillok reaches Korea) — and the desk’s instruments: the CHGIS historical gazetteer (TGAZ placenames, 221 BCE–1911) and the CBDB prosopography artifact (~658k persons, held for the persons-layer ruling).

One search skeleton spans the scripts: traditional, simplified and z-variant spellings fold together, so a modern-script query reaches the traditional-script corpus — and the character instruments meet on the nabu char card, a Han character answered across its structure, sound and attestation.

New here? The Quickstart sets up the library in minutes.

The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these 29 answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): zho 543,313 · lzh 93,438 · ltc 58,680 · vi 52,107 · och 38,234 · jpn 32,607 · cmn 7,387 · pli 7,288 · eng 4,794 · za 3,577 … and 3 more (nabu axis sinitic lists all).

Carried in by multilingual packs (ud, wiktionary-recon — whole-source members whose other languages ride along, as of 7 November 2026): xcl 8,544 · sga 6,691 · gem-pro 5,749 · gmw-pro 5,578 · sla-pro 5,461 … and 38 more (nabu axis sinitic lists all).

The desk’s instruments

• Literary and classical Chinese with its phonology: Kanripo (the largest single shelf) and CBETA, the UD lzh treebanks, SuttaCentral’s Āgamas, and the kaikki zh extract on wiktionary-recon.
• The reconstruction instruments: Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese (baxter-sagart), the Qieyun-system Middle Chinese database (tshet-uinh), Unihan, the Heian hanzi dictionaries (hdic, held), BabelStone IDS decomposition, and TLS at the sense grain.
• The character desk: nabu char joins every shelf onto one glyph, and search --radical/--strokes/--char-component filters the Han corpus.

Working the sinitic desk

The generic desk surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable sinitic               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync sinitic                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis sinitic          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis sinitic                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis sinitic   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu char 棄                           # the character card — strokes, radical, IDS, OC/MC, TLS senses
nabu search --char-component 木 --strokes 8-12  # component containment AND a total-stroke range
nabu search --radical 75 --axis sinitic  # the KangXi-radical filter on Han passages
nabu define 道 --long                  # TLS at the sense grain, with classical attestation
nabu show urn:nabu:kanripo:KR1h0004:001:1a --display reading  # gaiji &KR…; refs resolved to the real glyph or a placeholder

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “Scan 仁義 usage across the Chinese canon.” → nabu_concord 仁義 (lang: lzh) — KWIC rows in corpus order from CBETA’s historiographical treatises — left context, keyword, right context in the pristine text.

Terminal setup

• Han (lzh, kanripo): nabu measures CJK cells (Nabu::Display.width), so KWIC columns line up; --display reading resolves &KR\d+; gaiji.
• Install font-noto-sans-cjk-sc, -tc and -jp for the common ideographs, and Jigmo (covers every encoded Han) for the Extension-B+ tail the kanripo shelf reaches. Keep iTerm2’s “treat ambiguous-width as double-width” off to match nabu’s narrow measurement.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.