A Study On Ancient Paronyms With The Phonetic Complements Hou(侯),Wu(屋) And Dong(东)

Chinese paronyms refer to the words with the same etymology. It is necessary for the members of a group of paronyms to to be related to one another in sounds and meanings. In his Dictionary of Paronyms, Wang Li has made it clearly that "the words with congeneric sounds and meanings can be defined as a group of paronyms, so can the ones with similar sounds and identical meanings, or the ones with similar meanings and identical sounds. Always taking the same conception as the core, a group of paronyms indicate several close or related meanings by the slight differences of sounds." Wang has named Chinese paronyms as Tongyuan Ci, which literally means "words derived from the same historical source". After extensive discussions, now it is called Tongzu Ci (literally means "words belong to the same family") in the academic circles instead of Tongyuan Ci in order to avoid the confusion with cognate words from different languages. However, we still call Chinese paronym as Tongyuan Ci in this thesis so as to bring into correspondence with Wang.As a significant work of modern Chinese etymology, Wang’s Dictionary of Paronyms was a landmark achievement. Using ancient books as an entry point to study the paronyms, Wang has developed a method to confirm the relationship of paronymas:A group of paronyms should have similar sounds and related meanings. Wang’s method is scientific and reasonable, while obviously there were still some deficiencies, for the ancient scholars explained the meanings of words by Tongxun (a method to explain the meanings of a group of words by a synonym of them), Huxun (a method to explain the meanings of a pair of synonyms mutually) or Dixun (a method to explain the meanings of a group of words by interpreting the first one into the second one, then the second one into the third one, and so on).Adopting the above-mentioned methods, the ancients have given priority to the similarities among the concrete meanings of words in the exegetical books rather than that among the abstract meanings. But the historical sources of words are always contained in the meaning of them instead of being identical to them. As a result, the ancient scholars might not use them to explain one another, which led to the omission of large numbers of paronyms in Wang’s Dictionary of Paronyms. For the purpose of showing the relationship between concrete meaning and etymon of a word, Wang Ning has developed a formula:Concrete meaning of a word= Source-indicating sememe+Category-indicating sememeWith this formula, it is easy to explain the absence of some paronyms in exegetical books: words with similar source-indicating sememes may have quite different category-indicating sememes. Therefor, what we strive to do is to find out the paronyms which can not be found in exegetical books, and which were left out by Wang Li because of the distinctions among their category-indicating sememes.When dealing with a group of characters with the same phonetic complement, we start with picking up all of them. Referring to the system of ancient Chinese phonology constructed by Wang Li, the relationship among the meanings of these characters have been researched according to the layers of phonetic complements. And then, the paronyms among these characters have been sought out and analyzed. When picking up all the characters with the same phonetic complements, we have also taken Guangyunshengxi of Shen Jianshi into consideration. In this way, we were able to pay attention to how these characters were classified according to their ancient sounds or what was the relationship between them and the ancient paronymes.By researching the semantic connections among paronyms, we have noticed that the differentiation of paronyms has a great number of similarities with the extension of the meanings of synonyms, except that they lie in different layers. These similarities show that when we are trying to express something new with an existing word, we perceive the old meaning (or the old object) and the new object (or the new meaning) in the same way. Sometimes the old names are adopted just as what they are. sometimes they (often their sounds) are transformed slightly in order to express some new concepts related to the old ones. The semantic connections among paronyms can be generalized and classified from various angles. In his Dictionary of Paronyms, Wang Li has sorted them out into 15 types:tool, object, quality, action, similarity, specificity, doer, undergoer, abstraction, cause and effect, appearance, material, metaphor, resemblance, number, character, factitive, etc. Despite all this, Wang has only taken account of the exegetical books in his research of paronyms, while the semantic connections among paronyms were simply ignored.This thesis is divided into three parts:Chapter 1 is the introduction. The previous research results of this subject, the materials and methods applied in this thesis and the significance of our research have been introduced in this part.Chapter 2 is the main part of this thesis. The differentiation of words with the same phonetic complement has been discussed in this part, so does the etymological relationship among the words with different phonetic complements. In this thesis,327 words with 23 phonetic complements have been reduced to 16 word families.Chapter 3 is the conclusion. The achievements of this thesis has been concluded in this part.