Chapter 4 The phonetic notation method of the fourth word book

The annotations of ancient books and the phonetic notation of characters in calligraphy and rhyme books use Chinese characters, and there are two main methods: straight phonetic and fanqie. The straight phonetic method is two words with the same pronunciation, and one of the words is used to mark the pronunciation of the other.For example, "sudden sound tool".Generally, commonly used and easily recognizable characters are used as phonetic notations for uncommon and difficult-to-recognize characters.Xu Shen's "Shuowen Jiezi" uses the most phonetic methods: "read if", "read like", "read like a certain", "read like a certain book", "read with a certain ", this is a method of comparing the situation, that is, using a homophonic or near-sounding word to explain the pronunciation of the character to be marked, which is similar to "straight sound".For example: "Cheng, (走上亶) [zhan] also, pronounced Ruochen [now chen]." Some of the characters used for phonetic notation have the same pronunciation, some are just similar in pronunciation, and some may not be common, but in fact they are completely homonymous. Rarely, if there is a difficult word and there is no homonym.Or homonym is also a rare word, so the labeling of word pronunciation has just become difficult problem.Moreover, the application of the homophonic method is based on the premise that readers master the pronunciation of a large number of characters, so the limitations of this method are very large.Since the invention of the Fanqie method at the end of the Han Dynasty, Fanqie has been the main method for noting the pronunciation of characters in calligraphy books.

Fanqie method is to combine two Chinese characters to form the pronunciation of another Chinese character.Such as: "东〔dong〕音德红切", Germany and Hong are spelled together to become Dong. "切" [qie] means to cut together, and the "cut" in "Fanqie" means to cut together the upper and lower sounds. "Fanqie" is also called "Qieyu", from Wei Jin to Tang Dynasty it was called "so-and-so fan", after Song Dynasty it was called "so-so-qie", and now it is collectively called "Fanqie".Using Fanqie phonetic notation, the first character of Fanqie takes the initial consonant, and the last character of Fanqie takes the final consonant and tone. When the initial consonant of the previous character is combined with the final consonant and tone of the next character, it becomes the pronunciation of the cut character.For example: " work, ancient red cut ", " work " sound gong, the initial consonant g of " ancient " and the final consonant of " red ", tone (flat tone) are combined together, spell out the pronunciation gong of cut word " work ".The first character of Fanqie is double-sounded with the character to be cut (the initial consonants of the ancient and Gong characters are the same), and the latter character of Fanqie is repeated in rhyme (the finals of the characters Hong and Gong are the same) and is in the same tone as the character to be cut.In the absence of pinyin letters in ancient times, the front and rear characters of Fanqie were used as pinyin characters, and each Chinese character could be spelled out with Fanqie.

Fanqie originated in the late Han Dynasty.During the Three Kingdoms period, Sun Yan, an Anle man in Wei State, wrote "Er Ya Yin Yi", which was the first work in ancient times that used Fan Qie extensively (it has been lost).From "Yupian" to "Kangxi Dictionary", a large number of character books mainly use Fanqie phonetic notation, and it was still used until the compilation of "Ciyuan" and "Cihai" in the Republic of China.