Study On The Evolution Of The New Speech And Meaning Of The Chinese Characters In Radical Kou Since The Guangyun Period

In the past,the research on ancient Chinese phonology mainly focused on the medieval rhyme books represented by Guangyun,which was a static study.This paper paid much attention to the dynamic development of Chinese characters during the period from mediaeval times to modern times,as we chose the radical Kou as our research object.Through this,we were able to summarize the types of evolution of Chinese characters after the time of Guangyun,and we wished our conclusion would be a reference for the future study of Chinese phonetic history.According to the knowledge in the Hanyu Da Zidian(2~ndd edition),203 Chinese characters with new speech after the Guangyun period were being extracted from 1697Chinese characters of radical Kou.Then,we selected ten ancient rhyme books and dictionaries that were of great value in Chinese linguistics to record the speech of these203 characters in different historical periods,so that we could outline a path of phonetic evolution of these characters and made a brief list to show our work.On this basis,these characters were divided into two sorts in this paper according to whether their new speech is still used in modern daily life.For those whose new speech is still preserved in Modern Chinese Dictionary,we saw several factors that may create the phonetic change:folk dialects,simplified Chinese characters,proper names,variants and transliteration of foreign words.As for those whose new speech has disappeared in modern Chinese,we found that wrong glyphs,synonyms,phonetic loan characters in ancient books,ancient proper names and characters that seldom used could be the main factors that led to the disappearance.Meanwhile,we also focused on the knowledge that included in ancient materials and Hanyu Da Zidian,if there was a mistake,we would identify and correct it.Through this research,we could not only further improve the collection of Chinese characters that with new speech after the Guangyun time,but also summarize the general principle of the evolution of Chinese characters since the Middle Ages.Meanwhile,as we focused on the speech information of radical Kou,it would provide us a data source for building an information retrieval system about ancient Chinese.