Shijing Yun Du Chuci Yun Du

Author: Wang Li
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-11-01
Features: Reading ancient poems with modern pronunciation sounds awkward, a problem that has existed for a long time. The Song Dynasty was nearly two thousand years away from the era of the Book of Songs, and the awkwardness was already very severe at that time. People who read the Book of Songs were unaware of the difference between ancient and modern pronunciation, so they developed a theory called "yeyin" (where "ye" is pronounced as Xie, the same as "harmonize"). The idea of "yeyin" was that the pronunciation of the people who wrote the Book of Songs was the same as that of later generations. In many parts of the Book of Songs, the rhymes were harmonious, but in a few places they were not. In such cases, certain words had to be temporarily read with a different pronunciation to achieve harmony. The flaw in this theory is its lack of historical perspective. This book is one of the important works in Wang Li's research on phonology, consisting of two parts: Rhyme Reading of the Book of Songs and Rhyme Reading of Chu Ci.
Rhyme Reading of the Book of Songs takes all the chapters of the Book of Songs as the research subject, elaborating on Wang Li's views on ancient phonology. While systematically and thoroughly analyzing the rhyme rules of the Book of Songs, specific rhyme parts are marked after the sentences in each chapter, serving as an important example of Wang Li's phonological research.
Rhyme Reading of Chu Ci is Wang Li's masterpiece. The text begins with a detailed enumeration of the rhyme divisions of the Chu Ci, and the rhyme endings of each sentence in the Chu Ci are marked with precise phonetic symbols. This part is not only another important component of Wang Li's achievements in phonology but also an excellent work for studying the ancient dialects of the Chu region.