Continued Biographies Of Eminent Monks "vocabulary

Continuation of the Biographies of Eminent Monks(《续高僧传》)is a biography of monks composed by Shi Daoxuan释道宣),a famous monk of early Tang Dynasty who initiates Nan Shan Vinaya School(南山律宗),which is one school of Buddhist sects. It is recorded that this works is written from early Liang Dynasty to the nineteenth of Zhen Guan and finalized in 665 A.D.This book keeps track of deeds of four hundred eminent monks in more than 140 years from late Southern and Northern Dynasties to early Tang Dynasty, comprehensively reflecting politics, economics, culture, diplomacy and folkways, especially displaying religious life in those times. That makes it an important book to study the history in all directions in that period. Meanwhile,this book is another buddhist biogrophy written by the monk of Central Plains after Biographies of Eminent Monks(《高僧传》)by Shi Huijiao(释慧皎of Liang Dynasty, which includes not only a large number of words representing the characteristics of the language of that period but also is rare materials to research History of Chinese Language of those times.This treatise consists of five parts:part one is introduction indicating handing down of its versions and the research value of the biographies. Part two including the first three chapters, shows its characteristics of linguistic composition by means of qualitative study and part three i.e. chapter four, deals with the paradigmatic feature of the words and their levels of composition. Chapter five, the fourth part, finds out the general characteristics of the languages of the biographies from the angle of quantitative analysis. The sixth chapter is the last part mainly concerning the features of new word meanings and the ways of lexical evolvement.This paper proves qualitatively with a great many instances, the hybrid of classical words, buddhist words and popular words, which is the characteristic of biographies and meanwhile manifests that some words enter general words via the buddhist literature. Also compared with other medieval litetrature, quantitative study is made to confirm that the general features of lexicon lie between those of pure medieval literature of Central Plains and those of translated sutra. At the same time, it is proved that Continuation of the Biographies of Eminent Monks(《续高僧传》)is in the middle between the evolvement of Modern Chinese from Medieval Chinese.Three innovations in this paper are as follows:First, materials are newly developed. Biography of monks as a distinctive kind among buddhist literature, But so far, there is no comprehensive and systematic language study of biography of monks, It is the first time to study the language of biographies of monks comprehensively and specifically.Second, research is seen about with a new perspective. Generally speaking, specialized books are researched on their languages with detailed and synchronic description, but this paper researches language materials synchronically and diachronically, taking history as the goal of research on History of Chinese Language. For instance, classified description is given to classical words and analysis of levels of popular words is also made.Third, this research brings about new findings. First of all, these findings provide new evidences for predecessors and complement and demonstrate omissions of previous researchers. Then new linguistic phenomena are discovered with new ideas put forth. Later on this paper interprets lots of new words.