The Study Of The Ancient Chinese Names Of Human Body Lower Limbs

This paper belongs to the scope of the history of Chinese vocabulary. The verbal system of the human body lower limbs is part of the human body vocabulary system. This verbal system is one of the subsystems of ancient Chinese basic vocabulary, which is indispensable when reading ancient literatures, and is an important component of the history of Chinese vocabulary.This paper aims at searching into the time when each word and expression appeared,corresponding relations between name and object in different periods. So we can construct the name lexical system of the human body lower limbs from synchronic and diachronic perspectives. In this paper, the human body lower limbs are regarded as a system,understand the structure and the system of relations between each other.As the reference, we collect names of the human body lower limbs from the representative literature of different dynasties and inspect relations between name and object. Then we classify the names of the human body lower limbs in ancient Chinese periods including earlier ancient Chinese, middle ancient Chinese and later ancient Chinese and use vocabulary system theory to construct the name lexical system of the human body lower limbs in ancient Chinese and study the evolution of this system. Based on the study,we summarize the rule of the evolution of the human body lower limbs name lexical system in ancient Chinese.The paper is divided into five parts. The introduction part is about the object of the study, the academic backgrounds, the theoretic methods, the research contents and significance of this subject, and the corpora choice.Chapters one, two and three are the main body of the paper,on the study of human body lower limbs name lexical system in earlier ancient Chinese, middle ancient Chinese and later ancient Chinese periods. We describe the human body lower limbs name system in ancient Chinese from synchronic perspective.There are forty-one names of human lower limbs in total in earlier ancient Chinese;forty-eight names in middle ancient Chinese; and ninety-two names in later ancient Chinese.Chapter four is conclusion of this paper. It investigates the human body lower limbs name system from diachronic perspective.Firstly,we sum up the change and evolution of the human body lower limbs system names in different periods. Based on the conclusion, three characteristics of the historical evolution are summarized:First,as a whole, the trend of the development from a single syllable word to many syllables word.Second, some names of core part of human body lower limbs can be refers to the whole area.Such as: originally "shares" refers to the thigh, "jing" and "foot" refer to "shank", they are available to refer to the lower limbs.Third,the methods of the evolution of the human body lower limbs name way are varied.Some are the name changes of the human body lower limbs,some are the same name in different period referring to different parts of the human body lower limbs. Such as,‘foot’Originally refers to shank, and then refers to the entire lower limbs, finally sure to specifically to foot the parts.Finally,The paper also investigates the reason and the meaning of the evolution of human body lower limbs name system.The development of mankind cognition 、 the influence of the dialect and culture areexternal causes and the contradiction and adjustment within the system is the internal cause.The value of this paper as follows:First, we made the system of the words about human lower limbs, inspecting the connections between the human lower limbs and their names.Second, It provides comprehensive and accurate explanations for understanding the names of human body when people read the ancient literature. Third,this topic is part of the research on the human body vocabulary system,making a contribution for the research on the human body vocabulary system.