Mashiyi Wentong Duben

Author: Lü Shuxiang
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2005-04-01
Features: The Mashiyutong is the first work in modern linguistic theory to study Chinese grammar, holding a revolutionary significance in the history of Chinese linguistics. This renowned grammatical work was written in 1898. As an pioneering work, it has always been difficult to read and use. The distinguished linguist Professor Lü Shuxiang devoted significant effort to annotating, introducing, and commenting on Mashiyutong word by word and section by section, guiding readers on how to approach it. This made Mashiyutong more accessible and searchable. The revisions in this edition incorporate the latest findings from the collation of Mashiyutong. Existing versions of Mashiyutong were not user-friendly for reading or reference, so we compiled this reader to address these shortcomings. The layout has been improved to make it a "readable" edition, and an index has been added for easy retrieval of content. This book has made necessary adjustments to the original book's division into volumes and sections, with detailed chapters marked by fish-tailed brackets 〔〕. Titles have been added where needed. The original book's examples were continuous, but this edition starts each example on a new line and numbers them sequentially, using parentheses （）. Each chapter has its own numbering, and when citing examples from other chapters, the chapter number is added in Chinese. Since there are many examples, they can be categorized, with original explanations or newly compiled sentences highlighted for emphasis. Key words in examples are highlighted, and secondary keywords are enclosed in circles. Some examples in the original book were incomplete, making them difficult to understand, so this edition has supplemented them with full sentences. The collation of this book is based on the annotated edition by Zhang Xichen, with reference to the Guangxu Jiachen edition published by the Commercial Press. However, Zhang only annotated the examples, not the main text, leaving some errors uncorrected and introducing new ones. The original book contains many incorrect or missing examples, and Zhang's corrections were recorded in annotations, which this edition does not reproduce in full. Despite Zhang's diligent work, there are still many missed corrections, especially in the latter half. All errors we found have been corrected without additional annotations. Some examples in Mashiyutong do not align with the preceding explanations, and the supplementary notes are not entirely appropriate. The annotated edition by Zhang often cites corrections from other scholars, and this edition selects the useful parts to include in the footnotes. In the footnotes of Zhang's annotated edition, there are multiple comparisons between Mashiyutong's arguments and those of others, as well as critiques of Mashiyutong's grammatical system. This edition does not include these, as they exceed the scope of a specialized work's annotations and fall under the category of linguistic history. To assist readers who are reading Mashiyutong for the first time, we have written a detailed introduction that explains its grammatical system and provides some commentary.