The Research Of Fang Yizhi' Linguistics

The research of language has developed in Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties. Fang Yizhi is a famous scholar during the period of the end of Ming and the beginning of Qing Dynasty, who is well-known for his erudition. He has made great achievements in linguistics, philosophy, literature and astronomy. His book named Tongya epitomizes his linguistic philosophy. In recent years, there is an increasing tendency in studying Tongya, but here the writer thinks that linguistic philosophy represented in this book has not yet got its due recognition and needs further research.This thesis falls into three parts. Chapter one introduces history of Fang Yizhi, his works and nature of Tongya. Chapter two, main body of this paper, makes a study of Fang Yizhi's linguistic achievements from five levels: phonology, character, interpretation, vocabulary and proofreading. In terms of phonology, Fang inherited and developed Chen Di' s Theory of phonological changes. He recognized gradual change of language, and set phases for phonetic development of Chinese. In connection with the ancient Shengmu, he vaguely knew that in ancient Shengmu, there was no soft voice produced between lips, neither did on top of the tongue. With regard to study of character, he could grasp the changing trend of character from a macro perspective by means of which he carried out a systematic and in-depth study of Shuowen. In addition to this he made a very careful observation of what caused the ancient and present character to come into being. Concerning the study of interpretation, Fang made a statement of relationship between sound and meaning in theory and put the method of "seeking meaning from sounds" to a higher level. In terms of lexics, he put lots of efforts on study of dialect and...