Chapter 44 CHAPTER 11 THE BOOK OF STUDYING NAMES

In the historical records of the pre-Qin period, there are only some sporadic explanations of naming and character selection, not to mention research.For example, there are some simple records in the relevant chapters of "Zuo Zhuan Six Years of Duke Huan", "Book of Rites", and "Yili". Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty wrote "Shuowen Jiezi", which was the first to explain the original meaning of characters from the perspective of language by citing the names and characters of people in the pre-Qin period.This act gave great inspiration to later generations of exegesis.Ban Gu, who was at the same time as Xu Shen, revealed the relationship between names and characters for the first time in "Baihutong Names", which made people have a rational understanding of names.

Qi Jiayuan of the Southern Dynasties wrote the "Book of Names", and Suo Chang and Gao Yun of the Northern Dynasties both wrote "On Names", but the three books were lost and their contents are unknown.Judging from their biographical accounts, it should be about genealogy and the like. Lu Guimeng in the Tang Dynasty noticed the nicknames of historical figures, collected the nicknames of many celebrities in the historical period from Qin to the Southern and Northern Dynasties, and compiled a "Little List", which is a book of material compilation.As soon as this trend broke out, people in Song Dynasty followed suit.Chen Si wrote "Xiaozilu", Hong Sui compiled "Short List of Servants", Wang Zhi [zhizhi] wrote "Short List of Supplementary Servants", Wen Yu wrote "Continued Supplementary List of Servants", Zhang Bangji (ji Machine] also wrote "Supplements to the Little List of Servants".Until the Qing Dynasty, this trend still persisted.You Tong wrote "Short List of Palace Boudoirs", and Li Tiaoyuan wrote "Short List of Yuefu Servants".Most of them are curious, not research.But they gathered the materials together, which saved a lot of labor for later generations of researchers.Some scholars in the Qing Dynasty noticed some names in history. For example, Gu Yanwu, a scholar in the early Qing Dynasty, was an outstanding one. However, he only put forward some opinions here and there, and failed to conduct systematic and comprehensive research.In short, the opinions of scholars in the Qing Dynasty, like scattered pearls and broken gold, are mostly scattered in various notes.

The first person who concentrated on the interpretation of ancient names was Wang Yinzhi in the Qing Dynasty.He wrote a book "An Explanation of Names in the Spring and Autumn Period". From the perspective of exegesis, he made a textual research on more than 300 names of people in the Spring and Autumn Period (with a few Warring States), and summarized the way people named and selected characters in the pre-Qin period, and How to identify the methods of these names.Wang Yinzhi's approach attracted the attention of later scholars, such as Yu Yue's "Bu Yi", Hu Yuanyu's "Refutation", and Wang Xuanling's "Bu".After entering the Republic of China, there were still scholars who "supplemented" and "corrected" Wang, which shows the great influence of this book.

Scholars at the same time as Wang Yinzhi or later, many people also paid attention to the issue of ancient names.For example, Duan Yucai, Gui Fu, Zhu Junsheng, and Wang Yun, when they studied "Shuowen Jiezi", they all used the names of ancient people to verify the meaning of words like Xu Shen did.In addition, Cheng Tingzuo also wrote the book "Discrimination of Different Names in Zuo Zhuan", which is a work to clarify the phenomenon of confusion in the names of characters in "Zuo Zhuan". Song people have begun to pay attention to nicknames.Xu Guangpu compiled "Zihaolu".He collected more than 700 aliases of people at that time, arranged them in categories, and became the earliest reference book of aliases.Ge Wanli, a native of the Qing Dynasty, compiled "Biahaolu".In modern times, Chen Naigan has "Index of Room Names" and "Index of Aliases", which were combined into one book after liberation, called "Index of Room Names and Alias". In the 1930s, Chen Deyun also compiled the "Index of Aliases of Ancient and Modern Characters", which included all the characters, titles, and posthumous names other than the correct names of the characters.Yang Tingfu and Yang Tongfu specially collected the house names, aliases, and font sizes of the Qing people together, and became the "Index of House Names, Alias, and Font Sizes of the Qing People".These books provide great convenience for studying the names and aliases of historical figures.