Comments for Chinese manuscripts

Comment on Manuscripts of translations made from printed texts by imre

imre — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:53:39 +0000

That is an exciting discovery! That just shows that our knowledge of editions is still very limited and the reliability of dating is quite poor. After all, to this date scholars argue whether certain Dunhuang manuscripts are forgeries or not. If the top specialists in the field do not agree, there is indeed little hope for the average researcher to make sense of all this.

Comment on Criticism of Chen Mengjia by fellow scholars by imre

imre — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:50:11 +0000

That thought never occurred to me but I guess it is possible. Although in Chen Mengjia’s case it did not work out because we know that in the end he actually committed suicide. Which is not entirely a counter-argument, as it may just be that despite all his efforts he could not bear the situation anymore. Another thing to consider is why would he use his colleagues’ and students’ names to write self-accusing articles? In a way, he would be incriminating those people, at least in the eyes of posterity. In any case, it is a possibility and as such I am sure it happened from time to time, even if not in each and every case.

Comment on Criticism of Chen Mengjia by fellow scholars by erunner

erunner — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 02:48:08 +0000

Do you think the critical articles might have been written by the authors for self-preservation reasons? They may have wanted to attack Chen because he had been tagged as a “Rightist”, and in so doing prove that they were not at all like him. Just a simplistic deduction from what little I know about that period.

Comment on Sinological resources online by A Razak Bakri

A Razak Bakri — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:09:59 +0000

Appreciate if you could assist me to explore earliest Malay Kingdom encounter with Chinese Kingdom be it with Ming Dynasty or others.

Comment on Manuscripts of translations made from printed texts by Chris Atwood

Chris Atwood — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:35:17 +0000

In the Guoli tushuguan in Taiwan there’s an “old” manuscript of the Shuofu which I have demonstrated is certainly a post-1926 copy, since it was collated with Wang Guowei’s 1926 edition of the Shengwu qinzheng lu.

Comment on Graphic variability in a Ming printed book by Chris Atwood

Chris Atwood — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:05:23 +0000

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.

Comment on Orthography of Early Chinese Writing: Evidence from Newly Excavated Manuscripts, by Imre Galambos by sharon Ren

sharon Ren — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:42:56 +0000

Accidently I found your website. It shocked me so much that I have kept reading 3 hours. I worked on Chinese stone tablets(steles, 碑刻） a lot and some other Chinese folk documents (家谱、契约、方志等）。Honestly, your research makes me blush on mine. Even I am native Chinese speaker, your work shows I have so many to study.

Thanks a lot for your contribution to traditional Chinese Manuscript!

Comment on Cangjie created writing and the ghosts wailed at night by imre

imre — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:04:48 +0000

Dear Hockguan,

Thank you for commenting on my blog. As to the Qianziwen, you are right that there are not a lot of things that have been said about it. Yet its role in education and in calligraphy is truly exceptional, it would be well worth devoting a detailed study to its function in medieval China. I have not done any dedicated research on it myself, only keep coming across it in the Dunhuang manuscripts. There are dozens of manuscripts that have either the whole Qianziwen or portions of it, showing that during the 8th-10th centuries it was in common use. There are also a couple of copies written in seal-script (zhuanshu), and these are especially interesting.

Comment on Unattested character variant by imre

imre — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 07:44:13 +0000

I have not seen these two variants. 蒙 without the 豕 element makes me wonder if this could possibly be tied to some taboo. The omission of the “pig” in a term of self-reference may be coming from Muslim residents of the region. Actually, I don’t know.

I agree that complex characters in heavy use generate lots of variants. This might be true in general, regardless of the regionality issue. But then when a complex character is in a toponym, that character is used in that region with high frequency, which may result in more local variants.

Comment on Graphic variability in a Ming printed book by imre

imre — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 06:48:45 +0000

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…