Sun Yirang's Study On Philology

Sun Yirang, who was the last great master on Pu Xue in the last years of Qing Dynasty, acquired a lot of success in many fields, such as Study of Confucian Classics, Study of Zhuzi, Study of literature, Critical Interpretation of Ancient Texts, Study of Collation, Philology, etc. Hisstudy not only undertook the relique of Qianjia School--the main learning of Qing Dynasty, butadvocated the modern learning. Therefore, to inspect and summarize Sun's scholarship entirely and systematically possesses great significance for sorting out the academic history of the second half in the 19th century and the 20* century, probing into the tendency of the modem academic development and academic research. But, after almost 100 years of his major masterpieces being published, there are few people to study them wholely. Even in a certain field, there is little special and full research as well. This is a serious disadvantage to academic research.This thesis is to research into Sun Yirang's study on philology completely, systematically, and comprehensively under the guidance of such thought exactly. And the main body of it consists of three parts.The first part is about "methodology", that is, to discuss the methods about inspecting inscriptions on bone and tortoise shells and inscriptions on bronze used by Sun Yirang. Generally, it can be divided into inspection depending on structure, inspection depending on pronunciation, and inspection depending on meaning. Concretely, inspection depending on structure is divided into two ways: Structural Analysis and Historical Compare. In the part of Structural Analysis, it discusses such problems as "the analysis of character components" and "structural sign in common use" specifically. It discusses "the compare between inscriptions on bone and tortoise shells and Shuowenjiezi", "the compare between inscriptions on bone and tortoise shells and inscriptions on bronze", and "the compare between inscriptions on bone and tortoise shells and other ancient characters" in the part of Historical Compare. Inspection depending on pronunciation is divided into "using the homophonic relationship of characters to inspect inscriptions on bone and tortoise shells and inscriptions on bronze" and "using the knowledge of ancient pronunciation to inspect inscriptions on bone and tortoise shells and inscriptions on bronze". Inscription depending on meaning is divided into "to explain characters according to the meaning of context", "to explain characters according to ancient literatures", "to explain characters according to the examples and sentence structure in literature", etc.The second part is about "law theory", that is, to discuss some Sun Yirang's representative and important exposition on theory of philology. This part is separated into several sections: Theory of Chinese Characters' Origin, Theory of Chinese Characters' Evolvement, Theory of the three stages about Pictographic Characters' Development, Theory of Chinese Characters'Structure--the Theory of Mutually Explanatory Characters in Chinese. Theory of ChineseCharacters' Origin discusses Sun's two important judgments--"characters originating fromengraving" and "characters originating from drawing". Theory of Chinese Characters' Evolvement analyzes his academic views on the development of Chinese character, complicationand simplification of Chinese characters, and the opinion of omission and transformation. Theory of the three stages about Pictographic Characters' Development analyzes not only it's content but the evaluation towards this theory. Theory of Mutually Explanatory Characters in Chinese expounds the gain and loss of this theory dialectically.The third part-- "Theory of Chinese Character" is made up of "general illustration"and "respective illustration". The general illustration, which is divided into inspection about inscription on bronze and inspection about inscription on bone and tortoise shells, demonstrates the collective situation of Sun's inspection about inscription on bone and tortoise shells...