USE OF ALTERNATIVE CHARACTERS IN THE ANNOTATIONS OF ANCIENT TEXTS

• Published in: Journal of Chinese Linguistics 2019-01, Vol.47 (1), p.1-41
• Main Author: 何志華(Che Wah Ho)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chinese languages; Chinese literature; Confucianism; Dictionaries; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Historical text analysis; Language history; Orthographic symbols; Philology; Synonyms
• ISSN: 0091-3723; 2411-3484
• DOI: 10.1353/jcl.2019.0001

Exegesis (Xungu 訓詁) is an important branch of classical Chinese philology. It is a discipline devoted to the explanation of characters and expressions in ancient Chinese texts. The emergence of Xungu can be traced back to Er ya 爾雅, a Pre-Qin dictionary. The Han-Tang period, which is the heyday of the discipline, witnessed the production of many important Xungu works, most of them appearing in the form of commentaries. They have then become the indispensable guides to subsequent readers of classical Chinese texts. Given the canonical importance of these ancient commentaries, it is not surprising to see that most modern philologists regard the explanations of ancient Chinese texts offered in these classical Xungu works as authoritative dictionary meanings and uncritically adopt them in their own works. To date, however, little work has thoroughly examined how these ancient Xungu scholars arrived at their judgments. This article remedies this gap by clarifying the working mechanism of these ancient Xungu scholars in annotating ancient texts. It argues that these ancient Xungu scholars, when explaining a character in an ancient text, would first and foremost compare that text with parallel texts from other textual sources to identify textual variants. If a difference in terms of word choice existed between the text they were commenting and other relevant parallel texts, they would often uncritically use the latter to provide glosses to the former, even if the two were obviously not synonyms or near-synonyms. This article then shows that subsequent important philologists such as Zhu Junsheng 朱駿聲 (1788-1858) and Hong Yixuan 洪頤煊 (1765-1837), unaware of this unique working mechanism of ancient Xungu scholars, anachronistically mistook the judgments offered in these ancient Xungu works, which were simply made on the basis of textual variants, to be true and accurate dictionary meanings. As a result, they unavoidably established unnecessary connection between the semantically unrelated textual variants and ended up creating mistakes of their own.