Lately, I have been working with Ming editions of Zhuge Kongming Xinshu 諸葛孔明心書, a military text attributed to Zhuge Liang but which is most likely an early Song forgery. The earliest edition I was able to inspect was a moveably type booklet from Zhengde 正德 13 (i.e. 1518) at the Shanghai Library. Unfortunately the price for copies or scans was 100 yuan per page so I could not afford to make a copy. Yet even while at the library, I noticed that there were lots of vulgar character forms, some of them completely unattested. So when I found a facsimile publication of an edition from Jiajing 嘉靖 43 (i.e. 1564), I decided to look at these suzi in more detail. Of course, these unorthodox forms are not particular to this text, there are just as many of them in printed copies of other texts from the early modern period. They are a peculiarity of print culture of this time period and should be studied on a much larger scale, in hundreds of books together.
An early attempt to gather the vulgar forms — amidst the intellectual campaign directed at the simplification of Chinese writing — was a work called Song-Yuan yilai suzipu 宋元以來俗字譜, compiled and published in 1930 by Liu Fu 劉復 and Li Jiarui 李家瑞 on the basis of twelve popular (minjian 民间) books printed during the Song-Qing period. Of course, twelve books is a fairly limited corpus, especially since they come from an 800-year interval.
In any case, my own study is even more limited as I used a single text and gathered only about 500 different characters with some 2,500 concrete examples. Apart from the general impression that there is an incredible number of non-standard forms, the most surprising thing is that the same character is often written with orthographically different forms. This is of course not true for the majority of characters but there are still plenty that have two or more structurally distinct forms. Below I only list a few of them that are graphically different from each other (not all examples are).
Of these the character 懼 (ju ‘to fear’), for example, appears in its standard orthography, plus one that is today its simplified form: 惧. The same is true for the characters 辭 (which has three distinct forms), 後 (always used in thesense of ‘after’) and 並. The vulgar forms of other characters, such as 從 (cong ‘to follow’), do not match modern simplified characters. In addition, there are also lots of characters not included here that appear in the book only in their vulgar form and their standard form is never used.
What do these variations tell us? That even though we are looking at printed culture, which in our minds is often associated with an increasing level of consistency, in these minjian publications we do not see any sign of moving in that direction. Perhaps the study of shanben prints would lead to very different results, but the truth is that these popular publications comprised the overall majority of printed books at any given period. In this sense, they are more representative of how people wrote or what degree of graphic consistency was tolerated in their daily application of writing.
Graphic variant - 並
Graphic variant - 懼
Graphic variant - 經
Graphic variant - 解
Graphic variant - 後
Graphic variant - 侯
Graphic variant - 鬥
Graphic variant - 敵
Graphic variant - 從
Graphic variant - 此
Graphic variant - 辭
I have been working on the Shengwu qinzheng lu 聖武親征錄 which was preserved as part of the Shuofu 說郛 anthology. This Shuofu anthology has a large range of vulgar forms which I have also been able to trace through the evolution of the text. Many can be found in unicode, particularly as Japanese variants (such as 従 for 從), which you picture. But others seem completely unique, such a 衆 in the form of a phonetic element 中 in the midst of the two strokes of the semantic element 人. I’m currently compiling a sample listing of them for the various manuscripts, showing how the vulgar forms are gradually replaced as time goes on and the work becomes more linked up to scholarship.
I wonder if these forms go through phases of popularity or can be used for hypotheses of regional origin or chronological period of copying. So far they seem to be all contemporaneous, and based partly on the inherited features of the ms and partly on the idiosyncrasies of the scribe.
Dear Chris,
Great comment! When you are ready with your sample listing of the variants in the Shengwu version of the Shengwu qinzheng lu, I would love to see it. It would also be great to compare the different manuscripts of the Shuofu (and its earlier printed editions) for this text. It would also useful to compare this text to other ones in the same Shuofu manuscript, as it might reveal some of the idiosyncrasies of that particular scribe.
I am quite sure that if we analyzed the non-standard forms on a large scale across a range of texts produced in different geographical regions and at different times, we would be able to detect a number of patterns. This is inevitable in any statistical analysis, regardless of what you look at. I expect that some of the patterns would reflect regional or temporal characteristics.
Likewise, it is also true that texts inherit features from their earlier incarnations. But this probably does not mean that we cannot meaningfully sort these out. Our speech, while being fully comprehensible to other speakers of the same language, carries traces of a number of things from our own past, including our origin (dialect or accent), education, etc. At the same time, language itself also includes elements from different chronological periods, literary allusions, etc. Yet amidst this increadible complexity, it is often possible, after a few minutes’ conversation, to identify where someone comes from or what his educational background was. Perhaps because we know what to look for, having learnt as part of interacting with others which details are significant.
Anyway, these are just some random ideas, I am always open to suggestions…
It’s rather tedious totting up the variants, but I do notice patterns as you said. Having one codex descriptus in my “portfolio” (obviously I paid the money to get the copy from National Library BEFORE I knew it was a codex descriptus), you can see that the exemplar’s forms influence the copy’s forms, but that also that the time period does. My sense is, for example, that late Qing forms are more influenced by print than Ming ones. When I’m done (I’m actually playing hookey from counting up the various forms of characters in Shuofu mss right now), I’ll send you the list.