Arrangement And Research On The Book Of The Yi People 's Literature

This dissertation thoroughly studied an ancient document of Yi People, Mishuni, which was discovered at Wuding County, Chuxiong Canton, Yunnan Province 80s’ last century. Under the theoretical framework of philology, a series of theories and methods were applied in order to enrich this study, including ethnology, anthropology and statistics etc. With all these efforts, the nature of Mishuni was able to be revealed, along with its different editions which came from different resources. This dissertation keeps staying closely with the basic conception of philology and practicing the collative methods of philology.Here Mishuni is firstly published and transcribed by this dissertation and the title is settled by transliteration which means it’s a fortune-telling book. This handwritten copy has 40 pages contained 9456 characters, and was composed of three parts, Fortune-telling Book:The Year of Birth, Fortune-telling Book:the Moment of Birth, and Fortune-telling Book:the Three Parts of Born Hour. Mishuni now is reserved by the Wuding Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau and settled the sequence as No.28. Survived from water and times, yet its physical condition is still fine that only 23 characters were blurred.This copy was written normantively, which means it has enormous value on both philology and other relavent knowledges.Fortune-telling as epistemology is a kind of particular knowledge which barely can be called one, let along accepted by model science for it never offers any method to prove that it could be false. But as a kind of study object to academic history, fortune-telling has existed centuries left behind countless documents, reflecting human society then and there, and hereby, it surely deserves to be fairly studied by philology. Though a number of ancient fortune-telling documents written by ancient Yi people have been translated and published by now, few studies have been made in this particular field.In Chapter I of this dissertation, the survey of Mishuni will be thoroughly introduced, along with the methods of proofreading, translating and transcribing used by this dissertation. Translation for ancient ethnic documents seems to be too oral so far to deliver the elegance of those documents which they are supposed to have, so they would most likely fail to make the right impressions to their readers who might think they are reading some popular stories. If translation for class work can be more elegant and classical, it will be easier for reader to catch the idea of these class works’ status in the whole categories. As for the words which are difficult to be transcribed in Mishuni, they will be sovled by clearifying their meaning formed all the way down from beginning. A breakthrough study is that an exception against monogamy is found by the word, concubine, which has been mentioned a numbers of time here in this book. This is a meaningful clue for the study of ethnology and anthropology.In Chapter Ⅱ, Mishuni will be thoroughly transcribed with four-line type. The first line is the characters of Yi, the second line the phonetic symbol for the characters of Yi, the third line Chinese characters for the literality, and the last line Chinese characters for the meaning of the whole sentence.In Chapter Ⅲ, we will spend some times to discuss the methods applied in this dissertation about how they should be used, what they could illuminate, and where they might fail to explain as methods of philology. Combining with mathematics, statistics and philology, this dissertation is able to reveal the nature and history of Mishuni,and its effectiveness as a solid resource. The last discussion is about how the result of philology study can help other relevant sciences to build their theories by offering historical evidence. Though application, as a foundation subject, never is the key concept of philology, it has the capability to prove what exactly happened in history, especially when its results come from ancient ethnic documents since they were far less tampered by authorities’minds and needs.This dissertation stands tight with this standpoint as following:Using the theories from relevant subjects as reference is for enhancing the understanding to the object of philology, and then to itself. Using the methods from relevant subjects as reference is for widening the road of study in philology. Though it is so important for a subject on its way to perfection, creation shouldn’t be fondly introduced into a well-established subject. Creation is far not the aim but the path.