A Study Of Characters Written On Bamboo Slips Of Shuihudi Tomb Of The Qin Dynasty

During the history of development of Chinese characters, Qin's characters, which are between those of Zhou and Han dynasties, play an important role in inheriting and developing Chinese characters. Bamboo Slips of Shuihudi's Tomb from Qin Dynasty, whose characters belonging to the periods between the end of Zhan dynasty and the beginning of Qin dynasty, takes a great role in Qin's character materials. Its fonts are between those of seal character and li script and stand a special position in which ancient scripts had began to change but not been styled. In his work Shuowenjiezi, Xushen, a writer of East Dynasty, applied seal character, which is developed from Qin's characters, as acronyms. So this article selects Shuijian as the research object and tries to make a comparative analysis with Shuowen. With the methods of systematic and comparison, it also investigates and depicts the system of configurations and meanings of Shuijian in order to review the authentic map of the language at that time.The article is divided into seven parts as follows:The first chapter mainly introduces the general development of Qin's characters, the studying materials of Shuijian and its present status, the research logic and approaches and the overall view of scripts in Shuihua's tomb. From the perspective of the carrier of characters, the study of characters of Shuijian should be regarded as the golden key to probing into its developing rules. Great achievements have been obtained in annotation's arrangement, the interpretation, vocabulary and grammar as well as its forms and usage. However, there is still much investigation to be explored in the comprehensive and exhaustive comparison between the character system in this works and that of Shuowen. Therefore, the article is going to carry out reasonable and correct description of the development and inner rules of evolvement of characters based on the structural theory in forming Chinese characters with the methods of fixed amount and definiteness.The second chapter mainly deals with the collecting and analysis of the number, style and form of the characters in Shuijian. It picks out 1809 cognizable dominant-shape characters among which 20 words need further studying,167 words can not be found in Shuowen, and still 1610 words can be put into the category of dominant-shape. First, those 1809 words selected from Shuijian are strictly classified. At the same time,1610 dominant-shape characters are analyzed from the angle of structure style and mode. Then 1612 dominant-shape characters are restructured and analyzed according to the structuring theory of Chinese characters. At last, the article systematically discusses the basic strokes of all the characters in Shuijian and their process of simplification, complexion, assimilation and apperception and so forth.The third chapter is mainly about the comparison research between Shuijian's characters and Shuowen's acronyms, dictographs and accessorial new characters in order to display the similarities and differences in font style between Shuowen's characters and those of Shuijian.The fourth chapter mainly concerns with the literal congruence between Shuijian and Shuowen's characters. The development of words'meaning is always successive which presents congruence, approximation or relevance. The meanings of words are congruent in Shuijian and Shuowen, including the congruence in original meaning, applicative meaning and temporarily borrowed meaning.The fifth chapter investigates the literal inconsistency between the characters of Shuijian and Shuowen. It holds that the literal inconsistency is the reflection of the developmental prosperity and inevitable trend of Chinese characters. The inconsistency, in the word meanings of the Shuijian and Shuowen, can be reflected in the following five aspects:1) the word meanings in Shuowen fall within original ones, but unoriginal in Shuijian;2) meanings embodied in Shuowen are extended ones, while non-extended meanings in Shuijian;3) meanings embodied in Shuowen are temporarily borrowed, but no borrowed meanings in Shuijian;4) meanings embodied are both extended ones, but different in literal meanings;5) meanings embodied are both borrowed ones, but different in literal meanings;And it also takes into account and analyses the characters which can be found in Shuijian but explained incomprehensively in Shuowen.The sixth chapter analyses the characters appear in Shuijian but not in Shuowen. After finding 166 characters which are not selected in Shuowen, the author makes a reference to other ancient dictionaries and explains the reasons why Xushen failed to record those characters.The last chapter is to summarize the whole article. It presents the stability, maturation and complexibility of word system through the all-around contrastive research on font style and meaning between Shuijian and Shuowen. The feature of stability reflected in Shuijian is that it inherited from Xizhou Dynasty and had some special and steady components. The maturation is shown with the enhancement of forming motivation and structure hierarchy, the increasing phonogram and meaning-combined characters which truly symbolize the sound and meaning of characters. It can be said that there are complexibilities in fonts such as the contemporary of regular and irregular forms, the coexistence of motivated and unmotivated components, the combined using of complicated and simplified strokes. And it shows its complexibilities in character's meaning with the enlargement of meanings and the complication of extended and borrowed meanings.