A study of Xu Hao's Shuowen jiezi zhu jian = Xu Hao "Shuo wen jie zi zhu jian" yan jiu

Abstract

Shuowen Jiezi Zhu Jian說文解字注箋was written by Xu Hao徐灝(1810-1879), a Chinese scholar in Qing Dynasty, to supplement and revise on the Shuowen Jiezi Zhu說文解字注compiled by Duan Yucai段玉裁. Although Duan’s bookwas authoritative in the interpretation of Xu Shen’s 許慎Shuowen Jiezi說文解字, the annotation is too voluminous that there are sometimes inevitable omissions, lack of textual evidence and excess of subjectivity. After thorough examination, Xu Hao revised and supplemented Duan’s book, and established his own school of thought. Xu Hao’s Shuowen Jiezi Zhu Jian received little attention in the Qing Dynasty. It was not until the recent years that his work began to gain respect and value among different schools studying Shuowen Jiezi.

This work aims to investigate the concept of Chinese character classification described in Xu Hao’s Shuowen Jiezi Zhu Jian, and the use of unearthed ancient text material. It is divided into five chapters.

Chapter one is an introduction containing six sections presenting the research scope, motivation, purpose, methods, and value of this paper, as well as the contributions of previous studies.

Chapter two contains two sections introducing the biography of Xu Hao; a section on his birth, family history, education profile, political career, friends, and writing attitude, and another on his motivation for writing Shuowen Jiezi Zhu Jian, as well as the study of different book editions.

In Chapter three, the concept of Chinese character classification implied in Xu Hao’s Shuowen Jiezi Zhu Jianis reviewed. This chapter summarizes and analyzes Xu’s views about pictograms, simple ideograms, compound ideographs, rebus characters, phonosemantic compound characters, and derivative cognates. Additionally, the views of Xu Hao and Duan Yucai regarding Chinese character classification are compared, and Xu’s theory of language and characters is discussed.

Chapter four describes how unearthed ancient text material is presented in Xu Hao’s Shuowen Jiezi Zhu Jianby determiningthe frequency of ancient characters and then categorizing them. Subsequently, how Xu used the ancient characters to examine the form, pronunciation, and meaning of the characters is analyzed using the approval, disapproval, and complementary sections in Duan’s Shuowen Jiezi Zhu.