P’yohaerok was written by the order of King Sŏngjong in June 1488. It is one of the most important drifting records to China in the Ming era, which was published in six different printed versions in the Chosŏn period. There are two sets of versions, each of which is comprised of three. One is in Toyo Bunko, Yomei Bunko, and Kanazawa Bunko, all of which had been printed before Hideyoshi’s Invasion of Chosŏn in 1592. The other printed and published as a part of Kŭmnamjip after the Invasion has been available in South Korea. P’yohaerok is really an excellent work. For not only does it possess an important historical value of the Ming Dynasty but also allows us to discover a variety of linguistic data and phenomena such as nonstandard forms of characters, vocabulary, grammar and phonemes of native languages in the Ming era, etc. From the perspective of linguistic discourse, the author makes a detailed analysis of the Modern Chinese Linguistics of the work.

Gogeum Seongnim (Gujin Shilin) written by Lee Euibong (Li Yifeng), a scholar of the Joseon Dynasty, is representative of Chinese dictionary in the Joseon period. Its collected Chinese characters have large vocabulary, a long time span, and a wide range of contents, which are extremely valuable for the study of Chinese character communication outside China. However, the book is vast in traditional Chinese characters. And the creation of this book was after twists and turns. There are still many errors in the Chinese characters included in the book. Therefore, it is necessary to correct the wrong Chinese characters. In addition, the corruption of ancient Korean writing is not uncommon. This means that it is necessary to collate Chinese dictionaries and correct the wrong Chinese characters at that time, which is the basis of foreign literature research. This article selects more than ten representative mistakes of Gogeum Seongnim and examines them, and on this basis, analyzes the reasons for the mistakes as errors caused by negligence in transmission and copying, negligence in sentence segmentation, errors in pronounce, and errors in form. From this, we can also glimpse the types and reasons of errors in the Chinese dictionaries in the Joseon period, which we wish to be helpful to the collation of and research on the Chinese dictionaries in the Joseon period.

Jaemulbo (Caiwupu) is a dictionary rich in words, and has the nature of an encyclopedia. Giving a brief description of the collection and interpretation of the terms of plants and animals and observing the acceptance of the Chinese characters and words in the Korean Peninsula, this article singles out four myeongmul (meibutsu) words for textual research in order to observe the characteristics of vocabulary spread to ancient Korea. It has four main objectives. The first is to support the authoritative theory. The second is to ignore character and word relationships that lead to errors although scholars know that glyphs can be used universally. The third is to be cautious not to follow them blindly. The last is to influence the culture of the nation’s famous objects. It is expected that this research can make a significant contribution to the future studies on the spread of Chinese characters.

Big data and AI are the two major technical means of development in the current era. Thus, whether Chinese grammatology can use new technologies to achieve new developments following the trend as such is precisely the new problem and new field of the development of philology. The scientific research work on computer recognition of ancient Chinese characters has been carried out for more than 20 years, and it has achieved good results in methodology. However, it is only in the past three years or so that the real application has been made. In this regard, this paper summarizes the research status of ancient Chinese character computer recognition, attempts to analyze several factors that restrict the ancient Chinese character computer recognition from experiment to application, and puts forward the future development of this work.

The main purpose of this work is to provide an unprecedented view on hanzi which a particular group of citizens called graffitists use for their everyday cultural practices. To fulfil the purpose as such, it, most of all, seeks to think of graffiti in general or praxis of graffiti writing as a form of art based upon the de Certaurean conceptualisation of ‘textual poaching’. Taking a more philosophical approach to graffiti from a Spinozian-Deleuzian perspective, it, then, reconsiders both graffiti and graffiti writing to be ‘crimes of styles’ resisting the taken-for-granted law and order that not merely controls urban streets but rules the everyday lives of citizens. In the final analysis, it underlines the cultural value of hanzi against a series of violent assaults carried out by the State on us, the citizens.

English translators have many difficulties in choosing appropriate expressions to render ‘junzi 君子’ closely related to the East Asian Confucian cultural traditions into their language. James Legge’s renderings of junzi in Mencius, which vary depending on the context, are different from the contemporary tendencies to consistently translate junzi into the word ‘gentleman’ or the transliterated word ‘junzi.’ The paper argues that Legge’s various translations of junzi help us identify different nuances of meaning and reconsider some of our present conventional uses. It examines on the etymology of junzi and its historical and social development in the Warring States Period to examine Legge’s translation aspects. It also argues that Legge’s translation to specify junzi to a ruler, a prince and a sovereign sage in some controversial passages has a great influence on the English readers’ interpretation of the text. Legge’s specific translation directs readers to suppose that the Chinese word ‘junzi 君子’ is better understood as a benevolent ruler because he has the power to play a crucial role in achieving the true Kingly government and not simply a moral scholar.

It is at present generally believed that there was only 疾 but not 病 in the disease-related oracle bone inscriptions. This implies that there was no distinction between the two characters in the late Shang Dynasty, and that their concepts were not thoroughly understood in the Yin and Shang dynasties either. It was not until the middle of the Warring States period that the word 病 began to gradually replace the word 疾. In the early years of the Western Han Dynasty, the word 病 had a slight advantage. Since the Eastern Han Dynasty, the meanings of 疾病 (disease) and 生病 (to catch a disease) have been basically used instead of 疾. However, from the oracle bone inscriptions, there are about two kinds of characters: 、 and . These different types of hieroglyphs indicate different situations. The word 疾 in oracle bone inscriptions has not merely different glyphs but different concepts of human diseases as well. Therefore, this paper intends to trace back to the concept and usage of 疾 and 病 in the late Shang Dynasty from the shape of the word 疾 in oracle bone inscriptions, and to the evolution of the meanings of 疾 and 病 in ancient literature.

Ya-Bing Wang’s Ink Rhyme is a contemporary dance that interprets the essences of Chinese calligraphy art. The dancers depict the Chinese characters through the movement of their bodies, and each movement reflects the energy and power of strokes and structures. The dance manifests that ‘Life of Ink Rhyme’ is the ‘life of artistic conception of painting’, as well as the ‘life of dance art’. The dance creations of Ink Rhyme reflect upon the learning of traditional Chinese calligraphy. Besides the writing of the characters, the humanism and art contained within the dance could be applied to the development of creative design, thus facilitating cross-domain integration. Between the traditions and innovations, the philosophical thinking of cultural insights can incorporate new media, and deliberate over the display of contemporary diversity in the art of Chinese calligraphy.

The folk characters in Taoist scriptures play an essential role in the Chinese folk characters. For, they have important research value in the compilation of dictionaries, the collation of ancient books, and the study of Chinese folk characters. However, they have not yet attracted insufficient attention. There are many errors in the folk characters of the scriptures handed down from ancient times, and the problem of missing collation is also very common in the proofreader’s copy of Zhonghua Taoist Scriptures. Based on this, the paper examines and proofreads some difficult, vulgar, and corrupted folk characters, hoping to be beneficial to the collation of the Taoist scriptures.

The newly released No. 7-304 Liye strips of Qin is the twenty-eight year records containing Qin Shihuang’s move to Lingxian County to repay the government debt, the total number of registered people and mortality, and the specific circumstances of the punishment for the relevant officials. By re-counterdrawing, the original version of the bamboo slips checks on the mortality rate, final multiple annotations and modern translation.

The people of Shang Dynasty were superstitious, advocating ghosts and gods. They liked divination to ask the gods for anything, and used this to judge the good and bad. Therefore, ‘disaster’ and ‘auspicious’ are two very important aspects of divination. For the words about disaster in oracle-bone inscriptions, the predecessors have done more systematic studies. However, there is relatively little systematic research on words related to ‘auspicious’. So this paper focuses mainly on the words that few scholars have discussed before, and compares their glyphs, meanings, modified things and grammatical aspects between oracle-bone inscriptions and bronze ones. After the systematic comparison and analysis, it draws the following conclusions. First, in terms of the glyphs and meanings, the components and combinations of the words in the oracle-bone inscriptions are mostly stable, but the meaning extension method is simple and very imperfect. Second, in terms of the types of things modified, and in comparison with the category of the bronze inscriptions, that of the oracle-bone ones is more and more detailed, and at the same time, the focus of the oracle-bone ones is different from the ‘person’ to which the bronze ones pay attention as the focus of them is on the ‘event itself’. Last, in terms of grammatical functions, the words are more independent in the oracle-bone inscriptions than in the bronze ones, having the usage of single-word sentences. But they cannot be used as attributives, and the stability of grammatical functions is not as good as that in the bronze ones. Through the analyses and conclusions above, this paper shows the synchronic distribution, the diachronic development, and the characteristics of the words in the oracle-bone inscriptions in a comprehensive way. It also demonstrates the ideology and culture of Shang Dynasty and Zhou Dynasty, which can be summed up as ‘from the theocracy-centered to the ruled-by-men’.

Reflecting some significant differences in the dictionaries on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait through the process of distinguishing and analyzing common four-character idioms, this study mainly discusses the heteromorphic phenomenon of the idioms. The research method is to conduct research on the corpus of ancient and modern materials to understand ancient and modern usage of similar idioms. This study lists out eight groups of common idiom variants as examples. It intends to explore the reasons for the formation of individual vocabulary from the perspective of literary theory supplemented by the data content of the classical literature database and modern corpus to show the ancient documents and the modern people’s language use habit. At the same time, it compares similarities and differences between Taiwan’s Mandarin Dictionary (Revised Edition) and the Chinese Dictionary in Mainland China, comparing once again different aspects of the dictionary compilation and basic language education. It also shows the difference between both sides of the Taiwan Strait in the aspects of idiom variants included in dictionaries and the principle of word inclusion in them.

Memorable documents written in Dongba scripts, such as diaries and travels, record events in chronological order, which strongly reflect the value of Dongba applied documents. At present, few documents of this type can be seen. In January 2005, dongba He Xiudong, who comes from Tacheng Township, Lijiang City, Yunnan Province, accompanied Mr. Li Zaizhong to visit Aming Ling cave, after that He Xiudong wrote a travel note in Dongba scripts, which is a typical record. This article translates and interprets this travel note, and studies the writing phenomenon, phonetic complement, different graphs of the same word, multiple words in one graph, homographs and allographs of this document.

Paying critical attention to the concept of ‘transportation’ and ‘circulation’, this essay examines the collection status of vocabulary in bilingual dictionaries of various languages in early-modern East Asia. By doing so, it follows the trajectory of translingual practice, and clarifies a part of the transition of modern East Asian civilization. The research method in this study is as follows. First, it confirms the concepts of ‘交通 (kotsu, kyothong)’ and ‘流通 (ryutsu, yuthong)’ by defining a monolingual dictionary in Japanese and Korean. Next, it selects words representing each concept after investigating the translation (English) of a modern Japanese-English dictionary and Korean-English dictionary. The translated words corresponding to those representing the concepts are extracted from some major early-modern bilingual dictionaries of Japanese and Korean. It, then, analyzes the aspect of changes from the late 19th century to the early 20th century by looking into the translations of those extracted (Japanese and Korean). Based on the above-mentioned research and analysis, it reveals significant developmental characteristics in translating the concept of ‘transportation’ and ‘circulation’ in East Asia.

Not only does this paper examine the etymology of yuan元, yuan原, yuan源 and ben本 through Sinoxenic vocabulary but conducts comparative analyses of similarities and differences in them as well. yuan元 means ‘beginning, first’ and ‘root, origin’ in Sinoxenic words. However, its role was replaced with yuan原 at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. yuan原was originally used to mean ‘first, beginning’ and ‘origin, source’, the former of which has strengthened and the latter of which has become transferred to yuan源to which more meanings of ‘root, by nature’ have been added since then. ben本 means ‘nature, essence, basis’ referring to the essence or nature itself, thereby differentiated both from yuan源, whose meaning indicates the origin of such essence or nature, and from yuan原, which means ‘first’ and ‘beginning (initial appearance or status)’.

The study aims to identify significant features and cultural differences of fear-related vocabulary in Chinese and Korean language through contrastive analysis. As a consequence, it is revealed that words for fear are mainly included in psychological verbs, and that there is a great deal of replacing members in the semantic field. Also, these types show clear tendencies towards bisyllabification. In Korean, by contrast, most of the words denoting fear fall into the category of verb, the rest of which, on the other hand, consist of nouns or adjectives. Their members are included in either Korean native words or hybrid ones formed as ‘Chinese character and Korean language’. Then, fear-related idioms, too, are contrastively analyzed in Chinese and Korean, and the analytic outcomes are as follows: there are innumerable idioms based on metonymy and metaphor, and meanwhile, they have a great deal in common, yet with several differences in both languages.