The Study Of The Phonetic Loan Characters Of Silk Book One Excavated From Ancient Tombs Of Han Dynasty In Ma Wangdui

The scholars' opinions of the Phonetic loan characters, which is one of the six categories of Chinese characters have been widely divided since Han Dynasty. The concept of the Phonetic loan characters which used in this article includes the exchanged characters, because we think that there is no essential distinction between the two ideas. Both used a character which has the same or similar pronunciation to express the original meaning.The Phonetic loan characters is very important, so the scholars who study philology, phonology, exegetics must pay much attention to it. However, the documents which the studied the Phonetic loan characters were handed down from ancient times, and this kind of documents coulden't reflect the real use of Chinese characters because they had been changed by manuscript copy and inscription. Fortunately, the excavated documents had kept the truth of Chinese characters. So our study on the Phonetic loan characters must use the excavated documents. We can draw the accurate and reliable conclusion by this way.In order to make the detailed classified study, we counted the Phonetic loan characters in the Silk Book One Excavated from Ancient Tombs of Han Dynasty in Ma Wangdui(hereafter referred to as "Silk Book One"). First, we get rid of the same source characters, most of folk characters, error characters, and the same meaning words, etc. With respect to ancient and modern characters, we take them as the study material if them have nothing to do with the Phonetic loan characters in meaning. Second, we define these characters'harmonious sounds in ancient times and studied their pronunciation and form. The main conclusions drawn by us is:There are total 541 Phonetic loan characters in Silk Book one. 190 of them can be found in the documents which be handed down from ancient times accounting for 35.1%, and 351 cannot be found in them accounting for 64.9%. It shows that there are still many Phonetic loan characters kept in the excavated documents.There are 464 Phonetic loan characters which have the same rhyme and 277 having the same initial consonant in Silk Book One. The former counts 85.7% and the latter counts 51.2%. Furthermore, the same rhyme be used 1491 times which counts 89.2%, but the same initial consonant was used only 975 times which counts 57.9% in the total used times. It shows that people's favorite is rhyme when they used another character which has the same or similar pronunciation to express the original meaning. So Wang Guowei's opinion is not right.