"Return to a new line does not need to be translated, return as it is, all other Chinese should be translated into English: "The Legends and Proverbs of Yue" Annotations - Yue Culture Research Series

Author: Hou Youlan
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2006-04-01
Features: The Yue Yayi, written by Fan Yin during the Qing Dynasty, is a work that records the dialect of the Yue region (Shaoxing). The author spent several years, "lovingly collecting the local dialects and folk songs and rhymes of the old capital of Goujian," reforming his heart to gather the colloquial language of the Yue region. He "compiled them into three volumes: Language, Names of Things, and Sound and Meaning." He sought ancient meanings, found sources, examined original characters, and distinguished colloquial characters, "making what was spoken in the mouth fully expressed in writing, making the profound accessible to the present, and the limited knowledgeable in ancient times." After years of effort, he finally completed The Yue Yayi in the fourth year of the Guangxu reign (1878), compiling it into a book. The book covers various aspects of Yue customs, ethics, weather, agriculture, and ways of life, and emphasizes the etymology or historical research of Yue dialect words. It holds great value for studying the phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, and culture of the Yue dialect in the mid-to-late Qing Dynasty. The The Yue Yayi currently available is from the collection of Gu Ying Shanfang, published in the mid-summer of the second year of the Guangxu reign. Due to being woodblock-printed, it uses traditional characters in vertical layout, lacks punctuation, contains many variant characters or abbreviations (with missing strokes), and even introduces some unique Yue dialect words created by Fan Yin to faithfully record the unique dialect and pronunciation. This makes it difficult for general readers to read. To facilitate more people in understanding and further studying this valuable resource rich in Yue dialect words and culture, and to expand the group of readers and researchers of The Yue Yayi, the book Annotated The Yue Yayi primarily does the following three aspects of work:
1. Punctuation: By breaking sentences and marking punctuation marks, to clarify the structure of the text.
2. Character: First, converting traditional characters to simplified characters, but if simplification leads to ambiguity or the original text requires distinguishing character meanings, the traditional characters are retained as per the original. Second, standardizing variant characters or phenomena of missing or added strokes due to different woodblock printing practices into common standardized characters. In the original The Yue Yayi, homophones are retained in the annotated edition, with the homophone noted in the annotations.
3. Annotations: The annotated edition follows the style of the original The Yue Yayi. The original terms are in 10-point, and the original annotations are in 5-point . When a term has two different expressions, it is indicated in parentheses, such as "（）," meaning both "" and "." New annotations added in the annotated edition are marked with footnotes.