Academic literature on the topic 'Wen zi'

The Kong-zi jia-yu (“School Sayings of Confucius”) is an important historical source for the study of Confucius’ teachings. The text comprises Confucius’ sayings, records of his conversations with his students and other people, and also information regarding his life and deeds. Regardless of the factual cornucopia, the text remains almost completely unknown to Russian scholars. Equally, it has never been translated into Russian. The necessity to translate this historical source into Russian is obvious, at least because of the information regarding the life of Confucius (551–479 BC) and also the theory of his philosophy and belief system. The article offers the initial stage of the study of the Kong-zi jia-yu and comprises the Russian translation of the first two chapters. One of the tasks of the article is the identification of the sources the Kong-zi jia-yu is based upon. The translation is accompanied by the synopsis of the contents of the first five chapters, their composition and a source critical study about the information found in the Kong-zi jia-yu and the ancient Chinese works, such as Chun-qiu Zuo-zhuan, Xun-zi, Li-ji, Da Dai li-ji, Yi-wen-zi, Shuo-yuan. The study has proven that these texts should not be considered as sources of information for the first and second chapters of the Kong-zi jia-yu due to significant differences in detail description. It has been also established that the texts of the third, fourth and fifth chapters, which are philosophical dialogues to a large extent coincide with the chapters of Li-ji (chapters Ai-gong wen, Ru xing) and Da Dai li-ji (chapters Zhu yan, Ai-gong wen yu Kong-zi). However, regardless of these coincidences these texts still should not be considered as direct sources for the relevant chapters from the Kong-zi jia-yu. Most likely, the authors of all three chapters had recourse to the same source.

There are several signs with «diplomatic» semantics among the 540 most ancient radicals of the Chinese writing, presented in the dictionary “Shuo wen jie zi” (1st century AD, Han era). Before the dictionary was created, Chinese writing had already existed for several thousand years; therefore some researchers (Zou Xiaoli, 2007; Oshanin, 1943) consider that the etymologies of the radicals in “Shuo wen” were formulated under the influence of the later eras and are often erroneous. The attempts are made to verify the etymologies of these signs with “diplomatic” semantics by comparing them with the more ancient forms jiaguwen and jinwen, discovered and scientifically described only in the 20th century. Such a comparison and interpretation will reveal the probable correct etymologies of the analyzed radicals of the Chinese dictionary “Shuo wen” and verify them. In addition, the study will shed light on the beginning of diplomacy in ancient China. The article also touches upon the problem of etymological analysis in a language with an ideographic type of writing, which is carried out not at the level of morphology, as in European languages, but at the level of hieroglyphic sign graphics.The problem of semantics and etymology of radicals was considered mainly by Chinese scientists (Zou Xiaoli, 2007; Wang Fengyang, 2011, etc.), while in the European linguistics, the problem was studied only fragmentarily (Kondrashevsky, 1982; Karasyova, 2019; Dictionary of etymologies, 2019). The radicals “with diplomatic” semantics, analyzed in the article, did not become the object of special study.The purpose of the article is to verify the etymology of a number of radicals in the ancient Chinese dictionary “Shuo wen jie zi” with “diplomatic” semantics, to consider the information about the dictionary “Shuo wen jie zi”, its basic radicals and their semantics, to briefly describe the features of etymological analysis in general and in Chinese language in particular, to compare the definitions of these radicals in various etymological dictionaries, thus verifying the etymologies presented in the dictionary “Shuo wen jie zi”.

The article presents the main provisions of the theory of thesaurus-type dictionaries, gives definitions of the thesaurus, describes the relationship of the thesaurus with the type of writing, considers the main provisions of the Sapir-Whorf theory of l inguistic relativity and their connection with the way of thinking and methods of conceptualizing extra-linguistic reality by representatives of different ethnic cultures. The authors propose the thesaurus of ideographic writing as one of the models of ethnocognitive science and, using the example of the dictionary “Shuo wen jie zi”, substantiate the expediency of using the term “ethnothesaurus”.