The Study Of The Word Water In "Chinese Dictionary"

Written under the guidance of modern dictionary compiling theory,the Grand Chinese Characters Dictionary was planned in 1975 and completed with eight volumes in 1990,which took 15 years.After the first edition was published,it was officially revised from 1999,and the second edition was jointly published by Sichuan Publishing Group·Sichuan Cishu Publishing House and Hubei Changjiang Publishing Group·Chongwen Bureau in 2010,which took another 10 years.It can be called the iconic model of the compilation of Chinese language dictionaries,which reflects the academic standards of the Chinese dictionaries and cultural soft power.Combining the relevant research results of predecessors and scholars of the time,this thesis focuses on Shui Radicals(the component to a Chinese character with connotation of water)of the Grand Chinese Characters Dictionary.Under the guidance of lexicography,philology,exegesis,lexicology and other related principles,this thesis provides the first comprehensive research of Shui Radicals from the aspects of collecting characters,phonetic transcription and interpretation etc.This thesis is mainly edited from two viewpoints.One starts from the perspective of dictionaries and dictionary studies,comparing the whole department between the Grand Chinese Characters Dictionary and the Grand Chinese Dictionary.For the attempts to find out the problems of the two dictionaries in word interpretation and the history of language,and try to explore the relevant laws and characteristics of the large-scale language dictionaries.The other viewpoint is to use the Grand Chinese Characters Dictionary itself as a language material to sort out all the words with Shui Radicals,and to provide case studies of the typical semantic clusters from the prospective of lexicology.This thesis mainly consists of the following four sections:The first section systematically sorts out the research on the Grand Chinese Characters Dictionary in the past 30 years into two categories.The first category is the monograph,which mainly deals with the difficult and dubious words interpretation of the Grand Chinese Characters Dictionary.The other is papers,which are mainly studied from three prospective including dictionary arrangement,ontology research and non-pure language.The ontology research concentrate on the research of key and main contents,which can be further divided into characters pronunciation,the collection of head characters and glyphs,the correction of interpretations,the identification of the documentary evidence,and the word relations,the interpretation of the difficult words,the study of the Variant Character List,comprehensive exegesis,etc.The second section makes a comprehensive comparison of the two editions of the Grand Chinese Characters Dictionary,pointing out that the new version of the dictionary is much more optimized than the first edition in all aspects.The first improvement shows an increase of the characters from the original 54,678 prefixes to 60,370,in which 59 analogy simplified head characters and 133 new-collected characters were added to the Shui Radicals.Secondly,the glyph processing is more standardized and unified.In terms of interpretation,the second edition optimized the meaning of the word from the generical,historical,social and accuracy requirement.New meaning items are added including new meanings to a word and mutual visibility for the items.Additionally,it absorbed the revisions made by new academic researches on the old meaning items.The examples in the first edition has issues of improper and wrong documentary evidence,wrong documentary evidence,citations errors,and inconsistent format.These issues are fixed in the second edition accordingly.Meantime,some inaccurate and inappropriate documentary citations have been deleted for better reader understanding.The third section compares the words with Shui Radicals comprehensively between the two grand dictionaries.The Grand Chinese Characters Dictionary(Second Edition)contains a total of 2,148 Shui Radical words(including simplified words,analogy simplified words)with 904 head characters in Shui Radical category(fifth volume and sixth volume continued).After through comparison of the two grand dictionaries from the prospective of characers-collection,pronunciation,interpretation and references,lots of inconsistency are found including the differences of pronunciation settings,interpretation settings,division and combination of the meanings,notes of the dialect,relations of the characters,categorization of same meaning.There are many reasons for these problems.Apart from the different requirements of the system,some issues are caused by editorial oversight,poor implement with the editing rules,different understandings of the text and ancient notes,unavoidable academic disagreements and unclarified problems.The fourth section mainly analyzes the classification of the characters with Shui Radical from the perspective of lexicology.These characters with Shui Radical basically show the semantic meaning of water",which can be further categorized by the specific word meaning into the nouns that refer to rivers,lakes,and seas,or place names;a term that refers to the general term of water flow or the stoppage of water flow;nouns that indicate the land or waterside connected with water;nouns of all kinds of liquid;nouns that refer to weather or metrology;verbs that express water-related actions(mainly caused by other movements,distinct from the natural flow of the water);adjectives that describe shapes and appearance of water;onomatopoeias that simulate water-related sounds,and so on.In each of these large categories,subcategories can be further divided.The analysis of the character in these categories not only helps us to have a geneal understanding of the overall category of the Shui Radical characters,but also asissts us to clarify the connections and differences between the individual characters within the Shui Radical.Moreover,it provides building blocks for further Chinese language history studies.In turn,the analysis will complement the single meaning of the Chinese Grand Characters Dictionary,the problem of word selection,and the communication of interlingual relations.