"the Book" Lee Hyun-note Text Exegetical Study

Although Li Xian's Houhan Shu (History of Late Han Dynasty) annotations were co-authored by a group of scholars under the supervision of Prince Li Xian, these annotations are nevertheless systematic and scientific because they are uniform in style and content. The research value of these annotations in linguistics should be emphasized. Over a long period of time, some of them have been quoted frequently by researchers in such fields as Scriptology, Scholium and Textual criticism, but there still exists some materials need to be excavated further because of the large quantity and high quality of the annotations. The thesis mainly aims to study the annotations comprehensively and systematically in the fields of Scriptology, Scholium, Textual criticism and Chinese ancient culture research respectively.·ScriptologyThe thesis holds that through Li Xian's annotations, we notice that annotators had profound understanding on graphic structure of characters, allograph, popular form of characters, phonetic loan characters, ancient form versus present form of characters and semi-reduplicates. Although these forms of characters appeared and used in various historical periods, only a little of them were recorded in the ancient dictionary, and some information such as the exact time of occurrence were often ignored and omitted, or predicated much later. Li Xian's annotations usually gave an accurate account of these information, so created a solid basis for us to study the script system of Tang dynasty and even dynasties before Tang .·ScholiumThe thesis holds that those annotators already knew the characteristics of the semi-reduplicate words, which can not be explained literally. The annotations can differentiate between the loan words and loan translations, as well as the compounds and derivational words, and even can tell the distinctions between various types of syntactic relationships such as attribute-head, coordination, verb-object, subject-predicate in compounds. As we know, in ancient Chinese, the etymological meaning of some words were unknown to most people after a long period of time, and can only be acquired by careful studies. Li Xian was not far from the ancient times, and had good knowledge about these etymological meanings, so some annotations should be treated by modern people seriously because of their great value. The senses of many words have been evolving continually in the long history, and Li Xian's annotations provide much valuable information on those disappeared and changed senses.·Textual criticismUnavoidably, there are many redundancies, omissions and errors of writing in the tremendous amount of Chinese ancient literatures in the long period of circulation because of the restrictions of writing and preserving conditions, and knowledge level of the scribes and compilers. Li Xian's annotations had already made some collations utilizing the different ancient books or different editions, applying the linguistic and cultural knowledge as well, demonstrated the versatile method and rich knowledge in the collation. At the same time, the annotations quoted many literatures, reflected the original forms of these documents in Tang dynasty. Contrasting the annotations with the same ancient books in present time is of great value to restore the ancient literature, meanwhile to tell in which era and for what reason these errors occurred.·Ancient cultural researchThe annotations have many other outstanding characteristics. They not only analyzed the formation of characters and the meaning of words, but also explained the origins, evolvement paths and the states of ancient affairs, which make modern people understand the cultural and ritual system of Chinese more profoundly.