Basic Introduction Chinese Name: Introduction to Ancient Philology Author: Tang Lan Bibliography, Creation Background, Bibliography of General Theory of Ancient Philology in China by Tang Lan. It is divided into two parts: the first part introduces the scope and history of ancient philology, and then describes the origin and evolution of Chinese characters; The second part focuses on the research methods of ancient philology. Creation background This book, as the author's lecture notes for teaching ancient philology at Peking University, was written at 1934 ~ 1935, and only 200 copies were printed by hand, but it was not widely circulated. After the founding of New China, the Department of History of the Central Party School used photocopying as a teaching material. 198 1 year, Qilu Bookstore re-photocopied and supplemented the edition, and attached part of the revised draft of the author 1936 and the postscript for the Central Party School Edition 1963, which became the final version.
Introduction to Ancient Philology has a wide influence in the field of ancient philology. There are many creative ideas in this book. For example, the author divides ancient Chinese characters into four series: Yin Shang series, Bi Zhou series (ending in the late Spring and Autumn Period), Six Kingdoms series and Qin series. When discussing the evolution of ancient Chinese characters, we don't need the traditional six-character theory, but use pictographs, images and sounds, which some scholars call the "three-character theory". This paper discusses the classification of ancient Chinese characters, rather than the radical of Shuowen Jiezi, and advocates that pictographs are the radical, and that individual pictographs differentiated from pictographs belong to "parts", while complex pictographs belong to "families" and are called "natural classification".
Regarding the research methods of ancient Chinese characters, the book highly praised the achievements of Sun Yirang, a scholar in the late Qing Dynasty, and made a detailed discussion on the interpretation and reading of ancient Chinese characters with the radical analysis method.
There are still some places in the introduction that reflect the author's unique views. For example, regarding the origin of Chinese characters, we don't agree that characters originated in Shang Dynasty, and think that hieroglyphics in China have a history of at least 10,000 years, which has been recorded since early summer. Another example is to trace the origin of ancient philology and fully affirm the discovery of ancient books in Han Dynasty and the role of ancient philology. These arguments continue to be reflected in the author's later works.