The Phonology Research Of Shen Chongsui

Shen Chongsui, a well-known opera musician of the Ming dynasty, was born in Wujiang (now Suzhou, Jiangsu). He is the author of both Xian Suo Bian E and Du Qu Xu Zhi. The original aim of writing the two books is for singing and creating drama, so that those singers cloud know how to read notes and words. But Shen Chongsui, who was familiar with the swing, had great accomplishment on the phonology and he was good at creating from the perspectives of tune phonology, pronunciation problems, thus, it is also very impotant to study his works . This paper is divided into four parts, focusing on two aspects---- --Shen Chongsui's phonology ideas and dialect at the end of the Ming dynasty in Wu(now the southern part of Jiangsu province and the northern part of Zhejiang province), which was mentioned in Shen's books. From these two aspects, we can know Shen Chongsui's outstanding achievement in phonology. Shen Chongsui dared to innovate upon the tradition from the view of practical pronunciation. Shen also focused on the analysis of sound argument and put forward an original theory of phonology, which had positive influence to the later scientists; Shen Chongsui provided us with rich phonetic materials, which got from both north and south, and all these materials were based on his practical study, so they were very precious. Of course, there are also some shortages in his idea. Such as, his over adoration for Zhong Yuan Yin Yun, and some extreme thoughts.This paper has made a comprehensive and systematical study on Shen Chong Sui's achievements in phonology, which will make people, knew more about Shen Chong Sui. Thereby, more scholars will get the motivation to do more research on Shen Chongsui's phonology theory; after studying the material about dialect at the end of the Ming dynasty in Wu, which is got from Shen Chongsui's works, we know more about phonetic status of the late Ming dynasty, and it is also very helpful to study the developing history of phonetics.