A Study On Characters And Words In The Drama Of The Yuan Dynasty

The drama of the Yuan dynasty is not only the rare wealth of the classical Chinese drama but also an important component part of the traditional Chinese culture. It supplies the rare documentation for us to study language,characters,history and culture of Ming and Qing dynasties. The large-scale dictionaries such as Great Chinese Dictionary and Great Chinese Character Dictionary have compiled the overwhelming majority of characters and words in the drama of the Yuan dynasty,but they have not collected the whole words, meanings of words and examples. What's more,there are some deficiencies and errors in the large-scale dictionaries. This thesis will study the characters and words in the drama of the Yuan dynasty systemically,and it will make up for the deficiencies and correct the errors in these dictionaries. The Explanation of the Words in the Drama of the Yuan Dynasty is the largest-scale book which explains the words in the drama of the Yuan dynasty so far. But this book has not collected some meanings of the words yet. And it has errors of notes to words,phonetic notation and examples. This thesis will make up for the deficiencies and correct the errors in the Explanation of the Words in the Drama of the Yuan Dynasty. The Complete Works of Drama of the Yuan Dynasty based on Yuan Drama Selections is the largest-scale book so far, which has collected the Zaju(杂剧) and Nanxi(南戏) completely. This book has supplied plenty and very important data for the study of the drama of the Yuan dynasty. But at the same time,it has changed the characters in Yuan Drama Selections. However, some changes of the characters are inaccurate,even distort the original signification of the drama of the Yuan dynasty. The main errors are the wrong change of characters,the wrong change of words, the change of words out of context,changing official characters to vulgar characters wrongly,changing original characters to subsequent characters wrongly and the wrong record because of similar form of characters. This thesis will correct these errors and explain the reasons. We try to restore the true features of the drama of the Yuan dynasty and supply the precise data to the study of the drama of the Yuan dynasty.