The Two "tang" Biographies Of Words Comparative Study

Both The Newer Book of the Tang Dynasty and The Older Book of the Tang Dynasty, recording the history of the Tang Dynasty, are history books written in biological style. The two books are approximately similar in historical facts; by contrast, one is, to great extent, differentiated from the other in language. This paper tries to make a breakthrough at the two aspects above, and, by means of comparison, to carry out an overall and profound research into the two books' vocabulary and contents concerned. In the first four chapters, the paper, in accordance with the different number of word-formation, makes a contrastive analysis of the pair of the word with an individual character, the pair of the word with two characters, and other corresponding aspects in the two books, unfolding the features of their vocabulary and illustrating by detailed examples that The Newer Book of the Tang Dynasty prefers archaic and difficult words, whereas The Older Book of the Tang Dynasty uses the comparatively popular ones, all of which contribute a lot to the analysis of the corpus of the two books. Chapter five makes a description and contrast of neologism and new meaning in the two books. Consulting The Chinese Dictionary, we study the words in the dictionary by means of modern retrieval system to find out neologism and new meanings. By the contrastive analysis, a conclusion is drawn as the following: The Newer Book of the Tang Dynasty employs a lot of neologism and the quantity is much more than in The Older Book of the Tang Dynasty, which is the reason why the former is relatively more difficult to understand than the latter. In this chapter, we, referring to the conclusions made in the preceding chapters, point out the features of the corpus in the two books: The Newer Book of the Tang Dynasty is a works in classical Chinese modeled after an antique with typical characteristics of SongQi, while The Older Book of the Tang Dynasty is a work in classical Chinese reflecting the normal development of classical Chinese in the Tang Dynasty. The last chapter deals with some words and expressions in the two books, which are explained inappropriately in The Chinese Dictionary.