Study On The Folk Characters In The Ming Dynasty Archives

The archives are the official documents by the government officials managing state affairs, being with plentiful historical value, reference value as well as costful heritage value, being one of the symbols of our ancient civilization. As the most value of handwritten text, however, Ming archives has large scale folk characters, and lot of them are difficult to be identified accurately. With professional knowledge, we need the integrated application of philology, bibliology, textual criticism and computer technic to select them accurately and efficiently. Thus, the folk characters in Ming dynasty archives play a decisive role in "Chinese Fonts" judging by its great number and difficulty in collection and sort. Studying on the folk characters is a basic task for Ming dynasty archives interpretation. Studying on the folk characters provides importance of reference value in Ming archives and other archives. Collecting and study on these folk characters is of great significance to provide a overview of the use of words, to complement the dictionaries and build up the philology system. People have not yet had a detailed research on the folk characters of Ming archives due to its late proclaiming, having not yet had any monograph on it.In this study,we choose A General Collection of Files in Ming Dynasty as an object, and,collect and research on the folk characters in it. The body of this paper is divided as two parts. Parts one is the general theory, and the part two is folk characters table.Part one:Chapter one is the introduction of all the study, summarizing the related research, representing the significance of this study, introducing the object and research methods.In Chapter two, we define the folk characters in Ming archives for the first time,introducing the general situation of folk characters,exploring the subjective and objective case.In chapter three, we classify the folk characters for the first time, judging by the strokes, components,and full words. In chapter four, we adopt case study. We choose some words to explore their origins.Part two is folk characters table of A General Collection of Files in Ming Dynasty.We summarize this study at its epilogue.