Research On The Homograph Of Chu Bamboo Slips Collected By Shanghai Museum(Ⅰ-Ⅸ)

As one of the important objects in the collation of Chinese characters,homograph is a special inter-character relationship between two characters with the same form but different meanings.Homographs appeared in each era in the Chinese history,especially in the Warring States period.This thesis attempts to make a systematic research on the homographs of Chu Bamboo Slips Collected by Shanghai Museum(Ⅰ-Ⅸ)which is the recently published literature.We hope that it will be helpful to the study of homograph and the interpretation of unearthed documents.In this paper,10 sets of typical homograph-form Chinese characters from Chu Bamboo Slips Collected by Shanghai Museum,such as "tian" and "er","bian" and "shi","huo" and "yi" ect,are selected and studied in synchronic and diachronic aspects.At the synchronic level,we compared the homographs in Chu Bamboo Slips Collected by Shanghai Museum with the same ones of the same writing system at the same time,focusing on the horizontal comparison to distinguish the similarities and differences of the same characters in the form,in order to analyze the special characters of homograph form from Chu Bamboo Slips Collected by Shanghai Museum.On the diachronic level,the homographs from Chu Bamboo Slips Collected by Shanghai Museum are compared with Oracle,Words of Jin,the other Warring States characters,and the later seal characters,official script and regular script,to clarify the evolution of each character’s Glyph in the long history.Through carding the evolution process of each character shape,it is concluded that different homographs have the same or different causes,and the same homograph also have different causes of formation.On the basis of the principle that the dominant factors are the same and classified into the same category,we have concluded six major causes of the homograph,namely,"simplified homograph","complex homograph","reasons of the erroneous transformation","reasons of the handwriting","comprehensive reasons" and "other reasons".We summarized three methods of homographs interpretation by using distinguishing features,identifying characters according to their meaning,and collating and reading related documents.The research in this paper is of great significance to correct misinterpretation of characters,master the rules of using characters,and discover some problems in the process of transcribing.