EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 1 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 19 Grundmann Joern Peter (The University of Edinburgh) The LateWestern Zhou Guoji zhong 虢季鐘 Inscription Read as a Literary Text Key words: Guoji zhong, bell inscriptions, literariness, rhyme patterns, parallelism Chimes of suspended yong bells (yongzhong 甬鐘 ) played a crucial role in the politico-religious con- text of aristocratic ancestral ritual in mid to late Western Zhou China (ca. 950–771 BC). Used for musical accompaniment during sacrifices and feasts, these tokens of power and prestige have been excavated mostly from richly furnished aristocratic tombs. Texts inscribed on a number of excavated yong bells have startled scholars with their metrical regularity and the appearance of rhyme patterns. So far, however, these features have not been studied from a literary perspective. Instead, the trend goes to relate rhyme and tetrameter in texts from bell inscriptions to their presumed role in musical performance. In this paper I endeavour to show that a literary analysis of yong bell inscriptions may yield fruitful insides into the texts’ relation to their material carriers as well. Among the available corpus I have chosen a text inscribed on the late Western Zhou Guoji zhong 虢季鐘 assemblage for closer analysis. Here we find the same text repeated verbatim, four times fully and four times partly, over a set of eight bells that, taken together, form a full chime. This text, I argue, presents a conscious attempt to conjoin the bells’ materiality and acoustic properties with their main politico-religious functions by means of verbal patterning. In two parallel strands, the bells’ materiality and sound are related to their private and public functions through rhyme series and other means of verbal parallelism. Thus I hope to show how literariness, i.e. the internal organization of a text in a way that it foregrounds its linguistic manner, works here to textually reproduce an image of the bells embedded in their politico- religious context. Gurian Natalia (Far Eastern Federal University) Some Notes on the Early Chinese Dictionary “Guangya” (“Extended [Er]ya”) Key words: early history of Chinese lexicography, “Guangya”, Zhang Yi, “Erya”, “Explaining Kin- ship”, ideographic groupe The “Guangya” (“Extended [Er]ya”) written by Zhang Yi in the beginning of the third century A. D. is considered to be an extended version of the “Erya” (“Approaching the correct [language]», late third century B. C.). The conducted analysis of both dictionaries let us list the following features of “Guangya”. The “Guangya” clearly followed the “Erya’s” organization into semantically arranged chapters. Zhan Yi made no changes in the category sets as the new material he added was met the standards of “Erya”’s ideographic outline. In other words, “Guangya” can be seen as a new edition of “Erya” compiled in the third century A. D. In general, the volume of the first two chapters defining abstract words increased significantly by adding new lexical units and new glosses (entries). The fourth chapter of the “Guangya” entitled “Explaining Kinship” for instance is notable for the fact that in addition to kinship terms indicated by the title, it introduces completely new lexical groups, which have nothing to do with kinship itself (e.g. parts of the body and internal organs of a human being). Moreover, unlike the corresponding chapter in the “Erya”, the text of the section in the “Guangya” does not indicate smaller ideographic groups although they are implicitly defined by gloss order. Thus, the major macro-level changes can be seen in the “Guangya”, are the reduction of some former groups of words and introduction of new lexical groups. The major micro-level changes are in the con- tents of the glosses. In fact, some chapters defining concrete words turned from linguistic dictionary into encyclopedia. However, keeping the old ideographic groups of the “Erya”, Zhang Yi eventually refused precision in reflecting actual classes and groups of words defined in the dictionary, which is especially noticeable in the chapter “Explaining Kinship”.