A Study Of The Variants In Book Of The Later Han

Based primarily on Zhang Yuanji's annotation and collected annotations edited by Wang Xianqian, the paper carries out a comprehensive study of the variants in Book of the Later Han. Most often certain linguistic or calligraphic reasons have been given to explain the variation of different versions of the book. This is due to the recent development of lexical studies of medial Chinese language and the study of folk characters. It has been found that most variants of minor differences could not be treated with a hard standard of either correct or wrong. The differences reflect various calligraphic habits and the evolution of Chinese characters. Therefore this study takes a multi-temporal standard. Furthermore, necessary suggestion has been proposed, to correct the variants in Zhonghua's version and the wrong notes in Zhang Yuanji's annotation, and furthermore to improve the compiling of the 12-volume Dictionary of the Chinese Language (or Hanyu Da Cidian in Chinese pinyin). Different from traditional Chinese exegesis, this study is cautiously aided by CCL corpus of Peking University and especially the corpus of sinica in Taiwan.