Cognates. "book Of Rites," Zheng Xuan Comments

Zheng Xuan is emblematic of the highest achievement of exegesis in Han Dynasty. The annotation to The Book of Rites is a whole reflection of his commentary thought. When explaining the words or phrases, Zheng Xuan employed means of Seeking Meaning Phonetically. Upon a synthetic analysis to the practice of his Seeking Meaning Phonetically, this paper did a textual study on 175 pairs of cognate words from its 630 items of annotations to the words which are of correlation between pronunciation and semantic meaning. We also made a detailed textual study on the etymological meanings of those cognates, analyzed the relation between its pronunciation and semantic meaning, then went a step further, compared his etymological thought showed in his annotations with that of other contemporary experts of exegetics.This paper, taking the 1980 Zhong Hua Book Co. published The Commentary and Subcommentary to the Thirteen Classics which was checked and carved printing blocks by Ruan Yuan as an original text, using the research achievements of predecessors and present fellows, analyzed the cognate relation between the words for annotating and being annotated. It consists of five parts:Part I, Introduction, firstly introduced the biography of Zheng Xuan and background of his writing the annotation to The Book of Rites, then pointed out the acceptance and rejections on language resources, and at last, explained the significance of this study.Part II, Chapter One The Exegetic Practice of Seeking Meaning Phonetically in Zheng's Annotation to The Book of Rites, carries phonetically and semantically out an overall analysis to the exegetic practice of seeking meaning phonetically which Zheng Xuan employed when he annotated The Book of Rites, namely, Section One analyzes the phonetic relation between words for annotating and being annotated. Upon an analysis to 603 cases with similar pronunciation, we classify those into four cases which are same initial consonant and same vowel, same vowel but similar initial, same initial but similar vowel and similar initial and similar vowel; Section Two analyzes the semantic relation between words of annotating and annotated. There are mainly two kinds of relations, cognates words and heterogenous words, which form the semantic relation...