Description
Book SynopsisThis book continues and carries a stage further Professor Dobson's pioneering researches into the nature and development of Classical Chinese. He has here compared a Late Archaic text with a paraphrase of that text written in Late Han Chinese. From that comparison he describes in systematic detail the changes that occur in Classical Chinese in the intervening five hundred years. These changes, unlike the changes that take place between Early and Middle and Middle and Late Archaic Chinese, which are formal only, show a fundamental shift. The "empty words" of Classical Chinese which, in Archaic Chinese, are crucial as grammatical indicators, in Late Han become, as later philogists have traditionally described them, "full words." Many Archaic particles become obsolete in Late Han. The "full words" in Late Han, by contrast, perform a more predictable grammatical function. Periphrastic forms replace "participles" for negation, mood, voice, and the like. "Full words" tend towards compound
