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| A Study of the Explanations of Characters in Unearthed Eastern Han Dynasty Documents and Related Issues |
| Lyu Zhifeng1, Zhang Kailu2 |
1.Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China
2.Beijing Literature Language and Cultural Heritage Research Center, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing 100083, China |
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Abstract It is generally acknowledged that the Chinese characters used in unearthed documents can reflect authentic habits of choosing characters and writing of that time, containing important value. Therefore, the researches on the use of Chinese characters in unearthed documents of the Pre-Qin and Han Dynasties have emerged one after another in recent years, and the study of Chinese characters has also become an academic hotspot as well. These researches and studies mainly focus on character use, including investigating and comparing the forms of characters people choose when recording certain words in a certain language.There are many kinds of unearthed documents of the Eastern Han Dynasty, such as bamboo slips, inscriptions, brick inscriptions (characters on bricks, tiles and potteries), Maidiquan (land purchase vouchers for the dead), Zhenmuwen (used to separate the living from the dead, suppress ghosts and make the tomb stable), and so on. So far, many scholars have investigated or studied the use of characters in one material or several materials of unearthed documents of the Eastern Han Dynasty, when it comes to the whole unearthed documents of the Eastern Han Dynasty, however, the number of relevant research has decreased significantly, which reflects that there is still a lack of comprehensive research, systematic investigation and overall study on the use of Chinese characters.It is the center of this dissertation to research the corresponding relationship between characters and words. The relationship between Chinese characters and words is very complicated, not one-to-one correspondence. It refers to the concrete phenomenon that a word can be recorded by multiple glyphs, and a glyph can also record multiple words reversely. Since several phenomena of using characters such as Yiti (variant forms of certain Chinese character), Tongjia (interchangeable words), and Xing’e (incorrect forms of certain character) have been gradually discovered in unearthed Eastern Han Dynasty documents, there is no doubt that a large number of unearthed Eastern Han Dynasty documents reflect the correspondence between characters and words, like other unearthed documents, recording multiple words in one form and multiple forms of one word.Taking the above points into consideration, this dissertation intends to investigate and explain the specific characters/word selection phenomena in unearthed documents of the Eastern Han Dynasty, taking bamboo slips, inscriptions, brick inscriptions, Maidiquan, Zhenmuwen and other written materials in the Eastern Han Dynasty as the research objects. Five characters, including “辟 (bi)”, “皇 (huang)”, “葌 (jian)”, “桃 (tao)”, and “休 (xiu)” are taken as examples to explain the phenomenon of using one glyph to present multiple words, while ｛繫 (ji)｝， ｛来 (lai)｝， ｛痛 （tong)｝， ｛默 (mo)｝ and ｛鼓 (gu)｝” are enumerated to illustrate the phenomenon of using multiple characters to record one word.Furthermore, on the basis of a detailed investigation of several groups of characters and words that reveal the correspondence between the two, this dissertation will discuss and generalize four related problems that should be paid attention to in studying the characters chosen and used in unearthed documents of the Eastern Han Dynasty. First, when investigating and studying the use of characters in unearthed documents of the Eastern Han Dynasty, attention should be paid to the accuracy of characters used in interpretation. Due to the different purposes and norms of collation, the explanations of unearthed documents sometimes do not accurately reflect the use of words. So it is better to read the original manuscript. Second, the inter-word relationship between different words should be clarified, because some characters serve as each other and mix up with each other in extant literature. The variation of Chinese character configuration or writing and incorrect forms of characters often lead to the appearance of homographs as well. Third, the synchronic and diachronic use of words should be taken into consideration. The characters used in unearthed Eastern Han Dynasty documents have certain features of the times. Some new characters appeared in these documents. What’s more, some characters can provide the sources of glyphs or serve as examples for some special characters in future generations. Fourth, it is important to pay attention to the differences in the use of characters in literature. There are many kinds of the Eastern Han Dynasty unearthed documents, and different documents may have different habits in the aspect of choosing and using characters. Last but not least, the regional characteristics of the characters used also cannot be ignored. Some documents were discovered in unambiguous regions, thus the characters or words in these documents sometimes have certain regional characteristics. The characters used in dialect words can also be taken into account.In conclusion, this dissertation mainly dedicates to investigating the correspondence between characters and words in the unearthed documents of the Eastern Han Dynasty, by illustrating instances derived from various materials (such as bamboo slips, inscriptions, and so on) in two aspects: using multiple characters to record one word and using one character to record multiple words. Based on the research, it can be concluded that four problems, including accuracy of characters used in interpretation, clarifying the inter-word relationship between different words, the synchronic and diachronic use of words and the literature differences and regional characteristics of the characters.
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Received: 15 August 2023
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2024, Vol. 54 
