A Study On Folk Variants Of Chinese Characters In Drama Script Of Jinpingmei

Nanci Jinpingmei is a drama script adapted from the novel of the same name,which is published in 1822.There are 100 chapters in the script.Its storyline follows the original novel and its language is simple and plain,sometimes mixed with local dialect.Because the script is engraved and printed in a hasty way,it preserves and presents abundant Chinese characters in folk form,which is of great value to the study of the development history of the Chinese characters and its folk variants during the Qing Dynasty.On the basis of collecting and recoding nearly two thousand folk variants in script Jinpingmei,the paper drawing on the theory of Chinese Characters formation,divides them into two categories: characters with stroke variation and characters with radical variation,and make detailed description of the form of each kind of folk variants,which comprehensively display the appearance of folk variants in this script.By analyzing the folk variants in the script,comparing the related documents handed down and unearthed,the paper sums up the common characteristics of folk variants in this script,and focuses on four kinds of phenomenon of folk variants in this script: First,simplification,which is embodied in preserving the outline of characters,adjusting writing order to make it coherent,and changing stroke shape to make engrave convenient;Second,convergence,a phenomenon that the form of character can be influenced by adjacent characters of the same text,the characters with similar structure in the same writing system,or the characters with related meaning,and changed to another form that similar to the reference character;The third is to avoid repetition,which means that scribes change the form of the repeated characters by selecting variant characters,replacing radicals,changing the position and direction of strokes,so as to make the writing full of changes;The fourth is to inherit old forms,that is,the majority of folk variants in this script inherit the existing character forms of the previous generation.This paper mainly discusses two inheritance ways: font transformation and cumulative variation.In view of some difficult characters in this script,the paper uses the methods of the Chinese grammatology,exegetics and collation to explain six difficult characters“?”“(?)”“(?)”“(?)”“(?)”“?”,which clears some writing obstacles for reading and studying the script Jinpingmei.By collecting and sorting out the folk variants of the Nanci Jinpingmei,the paper reflects the usage of these characters in the script,and provides materials and comparative basis for the Chinese character corpus in Qing Dynasty.At the same time,analyzing the folk variants collected,explaining the causes of the phenomenon of folk variants,and tracing the evolution path of folk variants,which is of certain significance to reveal the law of the development of the folk variants and to study the history of the development of the Chinese characters.