Study On The Words And Writing Of The Sacrificial Rites Records In Shan Ching Of Shan Hai Ching

The language research on Shan Hai Ching(《山海经》, Classic of the Mountains and Waters) mainly concentrates on the annotation and emendation of the texts. Yuan Ke(袁珂)'s two books, Emendation and Annotation of Shan Hai Ching and Emendation and Translation of Shan Hai Ching, are the most influential versions of Shan Hai Ching after Qing Dynasty in this area. We use these two books and a recent publication, Annotation and Explanation of Shan Hai Ching written by Zhang Butian(张步天) as the main references of our investigations on the problems of the words and writing of the sacrificial rites records in Shan Ching (《山经》) that Yuan, Zhang and the earlier researchers have not well resolved.This thesis is organized into five sections:Yuan investigated the meaning of经of the book's title. He concluded经means'passing through'. In the first section, we propose that经means'structure and sequence', which is originated in经纬.In Section two, we find and list all the 25 paragraphs about the sacrificial rites in Shan Ching;Yuan, Zhang and the other researchers have not well resolved the meaning of祠,用,毛,牷,璋玉,婴,吉玉,縣(兼庪)in Shan Ching. In Section three, we focus on the meaning of the above words.We observe that the structure of many sentences and paragraphs in the sacrificial rites records in Shan Ching are very similar; meaning of the words in the same positions of different sentences of paragraphs are the same, similar or related in some other definite ways. In Section four, we use this feature to obtain the meaning of those words whose meaning have not been fixed by previous researchers through the meaning of the words in the same positions of different sentences of paragraphs, whose meaning have been fixed by previous researchers:冢,神,【鬼申】,合天,席,帝,钤,祈. Also we use thesame method to check and emendate some of the writing and positions of the punctuations, which separate the texts into sentences and paragraphs.The word用is a preposition frequently used in the sacrificial rites records in Shan Ching. In Section five, we single out four sentence patterns namely"A+用+B+C","A+用+B","用+B"and"用+B+C", and use it to check the collocation of the words and the punctuations'positions.