The Study Of Japanese Scholar Atsushi Watanabe’s Collation And Revise Of KangXi Dictionary

KangXi Dictionary is one of the most important Chinese ancient traditional dictionaries in the history. However, when this great book had been published, it had never been revised for nearly a hundred years. One of the important reasons is that the dictionary was edited by the Qing government. Every one at that time must respect the authority of this dictionary. So the number of all kinds of mistakes had reached nearly10thousands which had been found gradually by the users. Therefore this fatal shortcoming seriously affected the authority of the dictionary. And it also became to hard to use for the readers. Nearly one hundreds years later, Wang Yinzhi, one of the greatest linguists of Qing dynasty, had been pointed to revise this dictionary by the government. What he did had changed the status of KangXi Dictionary. After that, people have realized the importance of dictionary revise, more and more scholars began to revise the dictionary.Atsushi Watanabe was a scholar from Japan, Meiji Dynasty. It took him nearly seven years to write the book which was special for revising all kinds of mistakes in KangXi Dictionary. The book’s name is Collation and Revise of KangXi Dictionary. The number of collation has reached nearly9000entries and the number of revise has reached over4000entries. One of his research is worthy of attention, because of he had quoted Annotation of Shuowen Jiezi which was written by one of another greatest Chinese linguists of Qing Dynasty, Duan Yucai. The annotation part sometimes can give us some clues of Atsushi Watanabe’s characteristics of his research. Nowadays people do not pay much attention to Atsushi Watanabe and his works. Related research is very deficient. So this paper has great significance not only on the research of Chinese language history but also on the Sinology of Meiji Dynasty.Some research has been done on the comparison on Annotation of Shuowen Jiezi by Atsushi Watanabe and The Revise of Phonetic Notation on KangXi Dictionary by Wang Li and the analysis of quote part of Annotation of Shuowen Jiezi. We can come to some conclusions about the characteristics on the research of Atsushi Watanabe and Sinology of Meiji Dynasty. I hope this paper will offer some help and information to the later researchers.