The Comparing Between The Vocabulary Of Pai'an Jingqi And Those Of Modern Chinese

Abstract Pai 慳n Jingqi was a collection of vernacular short stories written by Ling Mengchu, Ming Dynasty. The paper looks on it抯 language as the typifer of the Ming Dynasty Chinese and compares the vocabulary of Pal 慳n Jingqi with those of Modem Chinese from five aspects which are the disappearance of words, the change of word抯 form, the evolution of word抯 meaning, phrase becoming word and the homophones between them. There are 250 words which appeared in Pal 慳n Jingqi and disappeared in Modem Chinese, among them there are 204 monosemes and 46 polysemes. The main causes of the disappearance of monosemes are the disappearance of the referents, the change of the social culture, the tendency of language becoming more accurate, the disappearance of morpheme抯 meaning, the competition between synonyms. The causes of the disappearance of every glosseme of polysemes are the same as those of monosemes. We can classify the disappearance of polysemes to two types. There are 116 words whose forms changed from Pai 慳n Jingqi to Modern Chinese, among them there are 64 words whose character forms changed, 44 words whose morpheme orders changed and 8 words whose syllable number changed. The character forms changed because Pai 慳n Jingqi used Lianmian words, Tongjia words and Gujin words. The morpheme orders changes can be classified to noun, verb, adjective, adverb and phrase. The syllable numbers changes mean monosyllables becoming polysyllables. There are 65 words whose meanings changed, among them there are 9 words whose semantic areas changed, 49 words one of whose glossemes disappeared and 7 words whose meanings were derived. Semantic area changes include word抯 combinability weakening and one of its collocations vanishing. The disappearance of glossemes can be classified to noun, verb, adjective, adverb and particle. The meaning derivations include semantic extending and semantic weakening. There are 4 phrases became words from Pai 慳n Jingqi to Modem Chinese. There are 7 pairs of homophones between Pal 慳n Jingqi and Modem Chinese. Cacuses which make homophone are word抯 divergence and morphemes?meaning being different. Some hotnophones not only their meanings but also their structures are different.