Research on Sichuan Dialect Words and Chinese Cognates

Author: Zha Zhonglin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-04-01
Features: In 1999, I applied to the Sichuan Provincial Education Commission for this research topic and received funding. Over the past three years, I have taught more than 1,200 classes, and this book was written in my spare time. It should take at least another five years to achieve comprehensive results. Faced with a stack of index cards, some notes, and a few drafts, I have first compiled and published these ten or so articles to show my efforts. Professor Wang Li once planned to study Chinese word families but later abandoned the project and instead wrote the Homologous Dictionary. To avoid speculation, Professor Wang primarily relied on ancient etymology, linking three to five characters for each entry, with no more than twenty characters in total. Every time I open this book, I admire his rigor while also clearly feeling his rigidity. He said, "Previously, we believed that among the three elements of language—phonology and grammar—only vocabulary was a disorganized mess. Now, through the study of homologous characters, we know that many words are interconnected." This deeply moved me, and I resolved to tackle this challenging task. My approach is to organize around phonetic radicals, interpret forms and meanings, and use dialectal materials to verify relationships between past and present. For some commonly used characters, I also explain their extended meanings. Crucially, I attempt to exhaustively link characters with the same phonetic radical. This may violate Professor Wang’s earnest warning to "avoid speculation." As a result, the work progresses slowly, and I often feel as if I am lifting a heavy tripod, fully understanding the sentiment of "a name takes months of hesitation to establish." Is this approach reasonable? Upon self-reflection, I believe I am both diligent and sincere. The school where I work is only 100 kilometers from my hometown. In 1973, with only two years of junior high education, I was recommended and then admitted to university through a lottery system with a 4-to-1 ratio. Nearly 30 years later, I have been studying and working at this institution. For 30 years, I have felt like an outsider, much like Lu Wei Fu watching bees and flies circle aimlessly. I often ask myself: Can’t you fly even higher? After graduation, I spent nine years compiling a dictionary, then ten years in the political department, and in 1995, I returned to the Chinese department to teach Chinese. Nanchong is quite isolated, and I interacted little with others. With no specialized field of study and no sense of belonging, I spent my days reading. However, the knowledge in books—lovable but unreliable, reliable but unlovable—still left me confused. Teaching Chinese, in theory, meant finding my "specialty." In middle age, I longed for a comprehensive understanding, and gradually, I became familiar with teaching. At this point, I realized I had spent a decade immersed in philosophy, and the dialectical way of thinking was inescapable. In the 20th century, Western philosophy that caught attention was the so-called "linguistic turn," primarily shifting from logical thinking to metaphorical thinking. Many Western scholars believed that human knowledge and culture, fundamentally, are not based on abstract concepts and formal reasoning but on metaphorical thinking—a concept and expression that precede logic. Re-reading Qian Zhongshu at this time, I paid close attention to his explanations of word meanings. Professor Qian, from the perspective of connection and development, cited and analyzed literature from ancient and modern times, demonstrating an extremely deep, precise, and skillful understanding of the metaphorical nature of expression, the polysemy of words, and the variability and growth of meaning. He particularly grasped the fundamental characteristic of Chinese language and characters: "a single character can carry multiple meanings, and they can be used simultaneously." As early as the 1930s, Professor Qian had a fundamental insight: "All concepts in science, literature, philosophy, and views on life and the universe stem from empathy. Our understanding of the world is metaphorical, symbolic, and as if we are borrowing from Li Hongyan’s The Path of the Wise Heart (p. 179, Hebei Education Press, 1995). He said, "Different emotions share a unifying thread, so a single character can encompass diverse meanings. The ambiguity and vagueness of language often stem from the confusion and mixture of real-world events." (The Collected Works of Guan Wei Bian, Volume 3, p. 1056, Zhonghua Book Company, 1986 edition). Reading his works, I naturally felt like an impulsive child, scratching my head in delight. The world is full of things and events, with everything intertwined and constantly changing. As the subject of cognition, humans are in constant battle—today’s self against yesterday’s self. Viewing changing things through different perspectives with shifting moods leads to abstract concepts and conclusions that naturally vary. However, all worries converge to the same goal. Professor Qian also said, "The heart is the same, and the principle is the same, because the principle is the same for all things. The sameness of the heart is rooted in the inevitability of the principle, and the inevitability of the principle is rooted in the necessity of things, which is also their inherent nature." (Ibid, p. 50). He also said, "One is mixed but not chaotic, and chaos can produce multiplicity. The ancient Greeks discussed art, emphasizing that 'unity resides in diversity,' which later became a golden rule." (Ibid, p. 52). I believe the principles and methods elucidated by Professor Qian are highly enlightening and instructive for the study of Chinese vocabulary.