Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty was an important figure in sorting out variant characters on a large scale after Li Si and others in the Qin Dynasty. In Shuo Wen Jie Zi, he arranged the ancient Shu characters, modern customs or styles with different writing styles *** 1 163 under the relevant seal characters, which is called heavy text. Reading Shuowen carefully, it is not difficult to find that Xu Shen's tautology is basically variant characters, and the sound and meaning between them are consistent. However, Xu fen's work was not thorough, and he didn't see many different languages, so he analyzed and explained them as different languages. A group of words like this is originally a variant character, and Shuowen does not overlap into a polyphony, which is called polyphony without overlapping word.
Variant characters have existed for a long time, and there are often several different ways to write a word in Oracle Bone Inscriptions. After several stages of development, such as bronze inscription, seal and official seal, the shape is more complicated. In addition, it is normal that Chinese characters are used in such a wide area and with so many people. However, many linguists have always regarded Shuo Wen Jie Zi as the golden rule. Undoubtedly, as long as Shuo Wen Jie Zi is divided into two prefixes, even though their sounds, meanings and usages are exactly the same, they are different.
Some dictionaries in later generations, including some newly compiled dictionaries, often follow the mistakes in Shuo Wen Jie Zi and regard a word as a variant. This phenomenon is not conducive to the collation of ancient books and the standardization of Chinese characters. It is imperative to sort out the repeated words in Shuo Wen Jie Zi.
Predecessors have long paid attention to this kind of repetitive articles, especially some scholars in Qing Dynasty, such as Duan Yucai, Wang Yun and Kong Guangju, have done a lot of work and accumulated rich experience. Duan Yucai often points out that a word has the same phonetic meaning as a word in Shuo Wen Jie Zi Zhu, or deletes some variants that he thinks are added by later generations. Wang Yun classified variant characters into variant characters in Shuo Wen Jie Zi. Their work has laid a good foundation for us to sort out the variant characters in Shuowen today. However, their finishing work is not thorough. First, they are too superstitious about Shuowen, and many heavy articles have not been pointed out or included in the book. Second, the choice is not appropriate. For example, many of Wang Yun's works should not be regarded as variant characters. On the basis of previous studies, I rearranged a vocabulary without overlapping words, which happened to be in Fangjia.
Why do the repeated articles in Shuowen not overlap?
One of the reasons is that Chinese characters are widely used, and people in different areas of the same word have different ways to create words, which leads to different shapes. Xu Shen didn't notice it, accepted it and recorded it, which resulted in repeated words and no overlapping words. Like what? Ha ha.
Different word-making methods and angles like this have produced a large number of repeated words.
Even pictophonetic characters, people in different dialect areas will choose different words to mark them. Shuowen is listed separately, which also forms repeated words.
Even when people in the same dialect area use phonetic symbols to mark their pronunciation, some people use A and some people use B, which is very accidental. Of course, there are also a large number of cases where pictophonetic characters are made with different characters, which leads to the different voices mentioned by predecessors.
The second reason is that ancient and modern glyphs have become heavy texts. Characters are developing, and many ancient and modern characters have been formed in history. After this word appeared, it was always used with ancient words for a period of time. Most ancient and modern characters have different meanings and ranges, so they can't be regarded as variant characters. But there are also some ancient and modern words with exactly the same meaning, which are ancient and modern variants. In a rage, Xu included the ancient and modern variant characters with the same meaning in Shuowen, which led to the repetition of the text.
The third reason is that Xu Shen's explanation of the meaning of words is not accurate enough, and he mistook the variant for two different words. In particular, some rare words rarely appear in ancient books, and they are often interpreted with the text, which is inevitable. However, some words appear frequently, and it is easy to sum up their dictionary meanings. It is easy to misunderstand that these two words have different meanings and do not overlap as tautology.
The fourth reason is that because of the different writing methods of Lian Mian characters, there are repeated characters without overlapping. Chinese characters in Lian Mian are phonetic, and many Chinese characters in Lian Mian have different writing methods. If these words with different writing methods have no other meaning, and if only one syllable is used to represent the same Lian Mian word, they can be considered as variant characters, but Shuowen is often classified as two different words. Here are a few examples:
The fifth reason is that Xu Shen's pronunciation is missing, and another word with the same sound and meaning forms a heavy text, but it is not listed as a heavy text. For example:
The sixth reason is that there is no overlapping word due to the increase of seal characters in later generations. In the preface to Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Shuo Shu received 9353 words, repeating 1 163. But when we look up Xu Ben, it is more than 9,400 words, and 1200 words are repeated. Extra words were added by later generations. There has been a lot of textual research and speculation about these additional words. Today, although we can't accurately point out the words added in seal script one by one, we can definitely add seal script to future generations in the following two situations. These characters attached to seal script often form overlapping word with some characters in Xu Shen's original book.
The seventh reason is that these two words have the same meaning. One is in a certain tone, and the other is from a certain province. This is a complex and simple two-body, but Xu Shen mistakenly included them in Shuowen. Like Jardine Matheson? 、? And then what? And so on, that is, one is traditional, the other is simplified, when overlapping is heavy text, it does not overlap.
The above analysis of the phenomenon of overlapping words and its reasons. I relaxed the scale of the following two phenomena when sorting out the different essays in Shuowen. Some words are not variants, but later generations mixed them together and turned them into variants. Chinese characters are developing. When two words are combined in the process of use, they can be considered as one word and two bodies, with differences, inhibition and harmony. There are some words that are extremely uncommon. Apart from dictionary income, there are no signs in ancient literature, and I have always been generous in sorting out the repeated words in Shuowen.
The following is a list of repeated words in Shuo Wen Jie Zi.