Haeree Park - The Writing System of Scribe Zhou: Evidence from Late Pre-imperial Chinese Manuscripts and Inscriptions (5th-3rd Centuries BCE)

Haeree Park

The Writing System of Scribe Zhou

Studies in Manuscript Cultures

Edited by

Michael Friedrich

Harunaga Isaacson

Jrg B. Quenzer

Volume 4

This book project was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (Summer 2011, Summer 2012 Fall 2013), DFG-Forschergruppe 963 Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa (Fall 2009), DFG-Sonderforschungsbereich 950 Manuscript Cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe (Winter 2013), for all of which the author is very grateful.

ISBN 978-3-11-044944-0

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-045930-2

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-045931-9

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2016 Haeree Park, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.

The book is published with open access at degruyter.com.

www.degruyter.com

In loving memory of my father Park Nung-chul

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington, Seattle, for their long-term support, especially to Professors Anne Yue-Hashimoto, David Knechtges and Zev Handel, and to the late Professor Jerry Norman. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Michael Friedrich of the University of Hamburg and Director of the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures for his many critical comments on drafts of this book and for his constant support of my work generally. I am also grateful to Professor Matthias Richter at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for his many useful suggestions and critical comments, and to my senior colleagues in the field of Chinese historical linguistics, Professors Wolfgang Behr at the University of Zurich, William H. Baxter at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Laurent Sagart at the Center de Recherches Linguistiques sur lAsie Orientale, EHESS, Paris for their encouragement and kind support throughout my graduate and post-doctoral career. I am greatly indebted to my teacher Professor William G. Boltz who supported and guided me with his vast knowledge and keen insight through the planning and completion of this book. I am thankful to Deng Lin from Seattle and Thies Staack from Hamburg, who were always there as good friends and knowledgeable colleagues.

Symbols and Abbreviations

E.g., (Cheng 12) means strip number 12 of the Cheng zhi wen zhi manuscript in the Guodian Chumu zhujian .

When a bamboo-strip manuscript from the Warring States period finds a closely matching received text, the textual variants between the two versions consist in graphic variants in the majority of cases: they are pairs of character forms in matching textual positions identified as standing for the same words while differing with each other in graphic shape or in the graphic elements contained in them. In the latter case, the judgment that they stand for the same word despite differences in their character structure is based on the fact that they exhibit some sort of phonological relation. And this relation is indicated by (a) the two characters share a graphic component that apparently plays a phonetic role while they have different semantic components conventionally referred to as classifiers, or one of the two lacks a second component altogether; (b) the two characters have distinct phonetic components and yet the words that they normally stand for, when they are read as their structurally coincident characters in the received orthography, are phonetically similar. When the whole character in a manuscript does not find a structurally compatible form in the received script, its apparent phonetic component alone is compared with the matching received counterpart. The status of phonetic compatibility is the same whether a part or whole of a manuscript character is compared since words that share the same phonetic component are presumed to have similar pronunciations.