A Study On Variant Pronunciations Of Consonant Rhythm Characters In Longkan Shoujing

Longkan Shoujing is a dictionary written by a Buddhist monk called Xing Jun for helping people read Buddhist sutras. It is in the important Chinese phonetic history period during which mid-ancient Chinese phonetics was transferring to recent-ancient Chinese phonetics. Its phonetic system has great value in many aspects. This thesis attempts to explore thoroughly the variant pronunciations of consonant rhythm characters in Longkan Shoujing with methods based on both internal evidence and exterior evidence and methods based on both Linguistics and Philology.This thesis includes 7 chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the general research condition on Longkan Shoujing and relative fields, the significance of our research and the version on which this thesis based. Chapter 2 introduces the research method and steps. Chapter 3 discusses the content and classification of the variant pronunciations of consonant rhythm characters in Longkan Shoujing. Chapter 4 explores the resources of the variant pronunciations of consonant rhythm in Longkan Shoujing with overall analysis and statistics. Chapter 5 reveals the features of the variant pronunciations of consonant rhythm characters in Longkan Shoujing from the aspects of font, phone and meaning. We mainly discuss phonetic feactures. Chapter 6 analyses the reasons of formation of the variant pronunciations of consonant rhythm character in Longkan Shoujing. On the basis of the researches above, the final chapter draws a conclusion that the phonetic system shown in Longkan Shoujing is a heterogeneous system, which contains pronunciations from both previous generation’s book and present spoken language. We position Longkan Shoujing as a general character dictionary including reading pronaciation and spoken pronaciation, serveing both Buddhists and non- Buddhists.