Character Differentiation

Author: (Qing) Liu Qi
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2004-07-01
Features: The book is a research work on ancient Chinese function words of high quality:
1. The single characters collected, except those with homophones, total 476, nearly three times as many as the 160 in Wang Yinzhi's Explaining Words in Classics and Translations.
2. The example sentences collected range widely, including not only ancient texts from the pre-Qin and Han dynasties but also Tang and Song poetry.
3. The book includes a significant number of disyllabic words, even colloquial expressions common in the Tang and Song dynasties, such as "děng tóu" (equal head), "děng jiān" (equal side), and "zhě biān" (side of the person), with approximately 1,140 entries. Liu Qi did not include Yuan Dynasty qu (a form of vernacular poetry), stating, "I will compile it into a separate volume in the future."
The book has been printed in woodblock multiple times but is now rare. In the early days, Kaiping Bookstore published an annotated edition by Zhang Xichen. On one hand, he corrected errors, and on the other, he compiled annotations and explanations from various scholars, listing them separately after relevant sentences. The book was printed and published with an index for convenient reference.