The Study Of Different Texts In "Shuowen·Shuibu" And "Hanshu·Geography"

ShuoWen:ShuiBu(???·???)and HanShu:Geogray(???·????),two works of the Eastern Han Dynasty,describe the condition of the rivers before Han dynasty with same administrative division of the Western Han Dynasty.Their authors,XuShen(??)and BanGu(??),are not professional geographer.They are not carried out field visits,as a result all the descriptions of the rivers were from previous literature works.There is uniformity in something such as language feature,river landscape and material resource.According to the statistics,there are almost one hundred rivers are collectively included by the two works,but there are lots of variant characters between them.All of them are precious materials in the research of Historical Geography.This article chooses the river as the research object which are collectively included by the two works to make a comprehensive investigation on the variant characters and the cause of the variant characters from the perspective of linguistics.According to the particularity of our research corpus,we use key information retrieval method and comparative method to find out the variant characters of ShuoWen:ShuiBu(????)and HanShu:Geography(?????),classify them by synchronic and diachronic study method and historical geography method,then analyze the cause of the variant characters.There are various forms of the variant characters,the variant characters of ShuoWen:ShuiBu(????)and HanShu:Geography(?????)manifest in three patterns,which are characters,words and sentences.It contains more ancient and modern words,variants and interchangeable words in the aspect of characters,contains more synonym,place name and locality name in the aspect of words,contains more variant characters caused by different style,sentence pattern and meaning in the aspect of sentences.We research them in the knowledge of philology,lexicology and syntactic,and study each type of the variant characters concretely.We can list five reasons of the variant characters,such as different resources,different describing patterns,missing,derivating or reversaling the words,assimilating or miswriting the words.The variant characters have important values on ShuoWen(????)theory,historical geography and dictionary compilation.The research of variant characters not only helps us emendate ShuoWen(????),but also rectifies the mistakes of great master of ShuoWen(????)in the aspect of annotation and emendation.The variant characters can help us have a great knowledge of geographic feature of the eastern Han Dynasty.Meanwhile,they supple and correct the deficiency in the aspect of style and place recordation of the Great Compendium of Chinese Characters(???????),the Great Chinese Dictionary(???????),A Dictionary of Chinese Historical Geographic Names(???????????).