The source of this article: "Harvard Ink Yang Liansheng Poetry Brief", The Commercial Press, 2004 edition
Transferred from: Modern University Weekly
Yang Liansheng
(Historian)
Look at language in terms of history, look at linguistics or knowledge of linguistics as an apprentice to history.
On July 25, 1968, I gave a speech, or more correctly, a conversation, to my colleagues at the Cai Yuanpei Memorial Hall of the Academia Sinica in Taipei's Nangang. Dozens of people, including President Wang Xuezhou and Mr. Li Jizhi, attended the meeting. There was a discussion after the lecture. There was no transcript for this conversation, only some notes to prepare examples. Later, according to the recording, it was deleted and added, and the tone was generally the same as before, so as to preserve its truth. I apologize for any lack of simplicity.
Dean Wang, Mr. Li, dear teachers, seniors, and friends, my topic is "History and Language", or "History and Language". When I wrote to Mr. Li, I mentioned this topic, and I said that it was a big deal. This topic can be large or small, and when it is large, the two nouns before and after the word "and" or the word "with" can be reversed and spoken on both sides. To make a small act is to look at language in terms of history, to see what importance linguistics or knowledge of linguistics is in the form of an apprentice to history, a person who studies history. Just like the relationship between scripture and primary school that we traditionally say, in order to learn the scriptures, we have to go through primary school. The meaning I want to talk about is very shallow, that is, to understand historiography, and we must not pay attention to all kinds of linguistic phenomena in history and history books, otherwise we will make a lot of jokes and make a lot of mistakes.
The topic itself is an interesting linguistic phenomenon. If the two nouns before and after are equal, just like "brother and brother", "brother and brother", "milk lady with little sister, little sister with milk mother" (joke word). Otherwise, the nouns before and after the word "and" can have a difference in weight and between guests and hosts. For example, singing the Beijing opera "Three Churches Triage", Lan Pao asked Yutang Chun, can someone visit you in prison, she said no. He also asked, "That prince," Yutang Chun replied, "The prince's family is more harmonious, and what love does the slave have with his dewy husband and wife!" "It's a common lyric, and the slave is on an equal footing with him. Some people re-sing "What is the love between him and the nulu water couple", which can be different between the guest and the host, which means that he is ruthless with me, but I still have love with him, so the implicit meaning is richer.
This kind of problem, called reversibility in English, is reversibility. History and language, if we can turn around, we have to talk about language and history, like what is "words are not written, deeds are not far away", "a word rejuvenates the country", "a word loses the country", and so on, all have to be talked about. Today we will discuss only one aspect, that is, history needs linguistics, just as scripture needs elementary school.
What we who study history should pay special attention to is that when reading books, we should pay attention to the era of books. The verb had no special meaning at the time, and what was the grammar of the phrase at the time. Here are some examples, some of which I have criticized, some of which I have made mistakes and corrected later. First the words, then the grammar. However, there is no need to have a very strict boundary between word collection and grammar, if you go to the imaginary word, it is already talking about grammar.
Let me give a few examples of social class identity, in the order of the times. All the gentlemen who study oracle bones know that the broom word of the oracle bones is women. But who is the woman? Most of our scholars in China think that a woman is a wife, a royal wife. When I translated Wuding Shijia for Mr. Dong Yantang, I translated it as wifi, but Japanese scholars, some people think that it is daughter-in-law. This is not unfounded, for example, in the Book of Rites and Internal Rules, "Parents of Children", "Uncles of Women", "Selfless Goods, Selfless Animals", sons and wives are sons and daughters-in-law. Chen Mengjia's "Summary of Yin Xu Bu Ci" only says that a woman is a woman's identity. If it's a noblewoman, it's time to translate lady. This is a rather ingenious and rather lazy method, because everyone wants to know the age of this woman. Mr. Zhang Bingquan once told me an example, the word is "Hehai Bu, Wang, Yu Fuqi's wife and nephew", this woman is obviously a royal wife, but other examples are still not easy to determine.
Another thing that Western sinologists often make wrong is the word slave, which does not have to be slave, especially in the word slave, which must not be translated as slave. A disciple is a disciple, and those who have been sentenced to imprisonment and punished for hard labor are very common in the Han Dynasty. There are many years of hard work, which is very different from those who are slaves for life, although there are also so-called long apprentices, after all, the identity is different. During the reign of Cao Wei, the scholar Liu Zhen was punished for hard labor because he looked at Zhen Hou equally, and he was subordinate to the book, which was the subordinate of the disciples.
Another problematic term is raw mouth. The raw mouth is a slave, perhaps a slave after being captured, or a slave who is bought and sold. The animal is called an animal (or a sketch), I think it was after the Yuan Dynasty. The Three Kingdoms "Biography of Wei Zhi Wang Chang" notes that "Chang bought a raw mouth with others and hired eight horses each." Employment means remuneration, and "jointly employing his mouth finances" is that everyone jointly gives him slave finances as remuneration. "Eight horses each" refers to the price of slaves, eight horses of silk. This mistake of "buying a common mouth and hiring eight horses each" is still preserved in some dictionaries and should be corrected.
To give another example of identity, it is the saint or the saint. The late Western sinologist Wei Lei mentioned An Lushan in his famous book "The Life and Era of Bai Juyi", saying that his subordinates must have admired him because they called him a holy man. This is a fairly serious misunderstanding. Saint or sage is a title given to the emperor by the Tang dynasty, which can be said to be an honorific title, but it does not necessarily show true respect. Just as many people in the late Qing Dynasty called Empress Dowager Cixi Lafayette, how many people really believed that she was a Lafayette?
I myself have misunderstood the term student. In the drama of "Erjin Palace", Yang Pu called himself a student, "standing at the palace gate to listen to the students talk about the north", which sounded very strange at first. The term, in The Beijing dialect, sometimes refers to children, such as asking "How many students do you have in front of you?" is asking how many children (especially boys). In the spoken language of the Ming Dynasty, the senior officials could call themselves students, and the juniors were called late students. In the Novels of the Ming Dynasty, there are examples of one or two pin masters calling themselves students to their juniors. This usage has been preserved in the joke, but there are probably not many people who really understand it.
Examples, nouns, lattice objects that have nothing to do with identity. Ordinary people think that things are things, and the "things" in Shanghainese does not refer to things, and "things" are things. In fact, according to the traditional commentary in the ancient books, "things, things also". Mr. Wang Yangming's lattice objects, lattice bamboo, bitter thinking into a disease, is also due to the misunderstanding of things as things. Later, he also said that things are things, as if they were his discoveries, but in fact, the ancient notes were already like this. The English word thing also has both meanings. Things are not limited to things, they can also be people.
Let's talk about another verb. The beggar's begging is mostly begging, and sometimes the meaning of giving is in the ancient books. You beg me to beg, and I beg you. For example, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty decreed, "Hou Honghong of the Army wrote a letter, the Xiongnu tied their horses to the foot of the city, and the Words of Relaxation, the Qin people, I beg for horses." "The Qin people are the Chinese, and the beggars are the beggars, that is, to you." If I beg for a horse, I will give you a horse.
Mr. Fu Mengzhen has a book "Dialectics of the Ancient Precepts of Life", which is a good example of clarifying the relationship between history and language. He said that in the ancient texts and in the ancient books, many times, sex is birth, and fate is order, at least the meaning is the same. Life (birth order) is a verb and a noun. The first half of his book analyzes the relationship between these four words and is a major contribution to philology. The word is linguistics in the broad sense and historical linguistics in the narrow sense, roughly equivalent to the traditional study of exegesis.
Here are some examples of grammar, starting with imaginary words. Some of the imaginary words in ancient spoken language are easily misunderstood by posterity, such as the famous "will not be the same", will not be a virtual word that indicates the tone, some people mistakenly take nothing as a real word, that is, nothing, that is, it is not right. A similar and more famous example is "nonsense", which is similar to that of the general, that is, "I'm afraid there is". The use of such an unpredictable tone of "unwarranted" in conviction is not convincing. Another sparse word (semi-imaginary word) is only, ordinary is only, but in the Tang and Song Dynasties, it often refers to near, that is, almost, almost. For example, Du Shi's "mountain city is only a hundred floors" is almost a hundred floors rather than a hundred floors. The problem is that when someone sees it, it is all translated as only and refuses to check it again. As long as you use more thought, you can also see from the context that such a translation is inappropriate.
There is also every word, this word is common in the Yuan Dynasty vernacular, Yuanqu, etc., which is the current character. However, if someone quotes the Yuandian Chapter and reads every word equivalent to the next sentence, it becomes a big joke.
Finally, two more examples of grammatical structures. One is that in the oracle bones, there is such a thing as "rain does not rain". Chen Mengjia thought that it was a choice to ask questions such as "whether it rains or not", which is a misunderstanding, because the syntax of "whether it rains or not" is very late. Rain or not rain is really two questions: Is it raining? Doesn't it rain? There may be a syntax in the text such as "rain is not rainy but unknown", which is difficult to say whether it will rain or not. The same is true of the yellow joke "to come and not to come, but to you". Chen Mengjia's explanation is because he has not noticed that the syntactic structure of ancient Chinese is very different from modern vernacular.
Another question to ask you is that the Analects "If there is the beauty of Zhou Gong's talent", this sentence seems to be interpreted as "if there is the beauty of Zhou Gong", or it can be interpreted as "if there is Zhou Gong's talent and zhou Gong's beauty". This is quite important because it involves the question of whether Zhou Gongmei or not is beautiful. Most of the notes, this point is not very clear. In the letter given to people by the Southern Song Dynasty Great Confucian Lu Xiangshan, there is "the beauty of the talent under the foot, the diligence of the question", which is obviously two parallel syntaxes, that is, the beauty of the foot and the diligence of the foot. This interpretation, as well as the classical evidence, is that the Book of Poetry, "The Purity of king Wen's virtue", cannot be interpreted as the pure virtue of king Wen. In other classics, there seems to be no similar example that can be interpreted as "the talent of Zhou Gong and the beauty of Zhou Gong".
August 15, 1968