Jia Changchao's Discrimination of Group Classics and Group Sounds

Seven volumes of group classics discrimination. Jia Changchao wrote in Song Dynasty, which is a book dedicated to the explanation of homographs, homophones and homophones in the group classics. This paper makes a centralized and systematic classification and analysis of the materials with different meanings recorded in Lu Deming's Biography of Tang Classics and its annotations, and makes a comparative analysis of these materials in terms of sound and meaning. At the same time, many materials with different meanings, such as ancient loanwords, ancient and modern characters, and four-tone variants, are collected and sorted out, which is helpful for readers to correct them.

The development of sound and meaning research and its own limitations are the historical inevitability of sound change. Since the Han and Wei dynasties, in order to read through ancient books, the study of sound and meaning has become popular all over the world, and books on sound and meaning have emerged one after another. In the Tang Dynasty, Lu Deming's classic annotations became a master of this kind of works. Shuowen Jiezi contains a wealth of different reading materials, involving a variety of different sources, and is a treasure house for studying different reading words in classics. Jia Changchao deeply realized this, so he attached great importance to the interpretation of the text and regarded it as a classic. However, Shi Wen only arranged a large number of different reading materials, and distinguished sounds by words, which were scattered in various ancient books, and the relationship between sound and meaning was complicated. Lu only sorted out the similarities and differences between pronunciation and reading, but did not give a centralized explanation on the choice of pronunciation and meaning. Although it is practical, it is decentralized and unsystematic. Therefore, on the one hand, in the process of interpreting classics, Jia always pays attention to extracting materials from classics and gradually accumulates them. On the other hand, according to the limitations of text interpretation, he classified the selected materials in different ways, and finally sorted them out, thus forming the book Yinbian. In other words, although almost all the materials used by Jia in compiling Yinbian came from the interpretation of the text, he did not copy it mechanically, but went through a process of digestion, absorption and consideration. Although the material belongs to the predecessors, it has been integrated into his own system, making it theoretical and systematic. Because of this, Yinbian has become a pioneering work, showing a brand-new look in both arrangement style and content. Jia's original intention of compiling Yinbian was mainly to "make scholars know what they said and learn what they used, which made little contribution to the translation of the same text" (Yinbian Preface), that is, to meet the actual needs of scholars reading classics at that time. Now it seems that the value of Yinbian is far more than that, and its unique academic contribution and important influence on later generations are particularly worthy of attention.

(The above two paragraphs are all quoted from Du's doctoral thesis of Shandong University. )