The Corrections And Supplement To Annotations And The Study Of Heterogeneous Chinese Characters On The Compilation Sequel Of Tang Dynasty’s Epitaph Dispersed In Luoyang

The Compilation Sequel of Tang Dynasty’s Epitaph Dispersed in Luoyang,edited by Mao Yangguang and published by the National Library of China Publishing House in 2018,consists of three volumes,and collects 406 epitaphs of the Tang Dynasty in chronological order of the owners’ funerals with the pictures of rubbings,annotations,and punctuation.These epitaphs are in large quantity,and the rubbings are complete.The status of the owners varies from high-ranking dignitaries to common people.It covers a wide range of topics from the biographies of the owners to important historical events,and shows important value in the researches of history,culture,military affairs,customs,etc.The scripts used in these epitaphs include regular script,clerical script,running script and cursive script,which demonstrate the writing characteristics at that time and help to supplement the study of the history of Chinese characters.At the same time,the epitaphs completely preserve a number of heterogeneous Chinese characters,which reflect the use of heterogeneous Chinese characters in stele inscriptions and epitaphs,and provide detailed,precious and firsthand materials for the study of these heterogeneous Chinese characters.Although these epitaphs have been carefully annotated by the editor,or some of the epitaphs have already been published in the form of pictures or with annotations in books or journals such as The New Epitaphs Collection of Qin Jinn Yu,The New Epitaphs Searching Continuation of Qin Jin Yu,and The New Epitaphas Collection of Luoyang in 2015,due to the variations in the shape of Chinese characters,careless writing,and the erosion of gravestones,it is inevitable that there are wrongly annotated or unannotated Chinese characters in the existing epitaphs,which directly affects the use and research of the materials.This thesis compares the pictures of different rubbings,supplements the missing Chinese characters,and corrects the wrong annotations,in order to present the original appearance as much as possible.On this basis,guided by the theory of Chinese character formation,the writer of the thesis collects and sorts out the heterogeneous Chinese characters in the epitaphs,and conducts specialized study on heterogeneous Chinese characters by analyzing the current situation of the collected forms of Chinese characters,in order to make contribution to the research on heterogeneous Chinese characters in stele inscriptions,and to provide reference for the follow-up study of Chinese characters of modern times.The thesis consists of four parts: introduction,the correction and supplement to annotations,the research on heterogeneous Chinese characters,and the examples and explanations of heterogeneous Chinese characters.The chapter Introduction mainly focuses on the materials,the background,the current situation,the significance,the method of the research.The chapter The Correction and Supplement to Annotations contains the existing annotations of all the materials,corrects the errors of the annotations,supplements the words that can be annotated but not annotated,adds punctuation,and makes simple textual research,in the order of the epitaphs in The Compilation Sequel of Tang Dynasty’s Epitaph Dispersed in Luoyang,,with a view to providing reliable reference to the follow-up use and research of these epitaphs.Chapter Three is the research on heterogeneous Chinese characters.This part first clarifies the definition of heterogeneous Chinese characters,then distinguishes between heterogeneous Chinese characters and different writing,and collects and classifies the heterogeneous Chinese characters in these epitaphs,to conduct research.This thesis divides the heterogeneous Chinese characters into six categories,namely,the ones with the change of the phonetic symbol,the ones with the change of the ideogram,the ones with the change of both the phonetic symbol and the ideogram,the ones with the signalling components,the ones with the addition or subtraction of components,the ones formed in different methods.The major categories are divided into sub-categories.For example,the ones with the change of the phonetic symbol are subdivided into the ones with the interchange of the same phonetic symbols,the ones with the interchange of the similar phonetic symbols,and the ones with its phonetic symbols sharing the same or similar pronunciation with the whole character after the change.The ones with the change of the signifier are subdivided into the ones with the similar signifier meaning,the ones using other signifiers whose meaning is related to the meaning of the whole character,etc.Each categories or sub-categories are demonstrated with typical Chinese characters.Chapter Four is The Examples and Explanations of Heterogeneous Chinese Characters.The writer of the thesis selects eleven groups of heterogeneous Chinese characters which are easy to be mistaken or rare in stele inscriptions.The thesis contains the detailed textual research,analyzes their rationale,traces back to their origins,and probed into their rules,in order to provide empirical data for the study of Chinese stone inscriptions and Chinese characters of modern times.