Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 588  David Sehnal   ently only due to this fact we know what many OC words used to mean. We know that the word 道 dào meant “way” in OC, because in Modern Chinese there exists the morpheme 道 dào with the same meaning, like in 道路，人 行道 etc. It would be odd to try to find for the OC 道 dào any completely different meaning which is unrelated to the meaning “way”. Naturally, the language does develop and in this course the shifts in meanings of lexemes are occuring. Many of these shifts are well documented and recorded in dictionaries, e. g. the OC word 走 z u used to mean “run”, whereas in Modern Chinese it means “go”. Ch. Harbsmeier shows convinc- ingly that the OC 哭 kū never meant simply “weep” but always “lament loudly and publicly”. 言 y n used to mean “express oneself publicly” and not just “speak” etc. Many of the OC words are nevertheless still waiting for their exact semantic differentiation from their modern relatives. b) Network of OC synonymic and antonymic expressions. The correct meaning of a given lexeme is often defined by its opposition against another lexemes in the text, or, by its minimal context. E. g. the word 人 r n in op- position to 獸 shòu “animal” evidently means “human”, whereas 人 r n in opposition to 我 w would mean “the others”. The question whether we are dealing with two different meanings of the same lexeme or two different lexemes one has to solve within the whole system of OC vocabulary. Net- work of well defined OC synonyms and antonyms is gradually built also in the scope of TLS. c) Lexicographic works and reference, as well as traditional commentar- ies. Here it applies fully that every seemingly trivial and obvious information must be subjected to critical inspection. The tradition is to be respected but not followed blindly, because the old commentators in many cases were not much better equipped than our contemporaries. After all, also the reading of commentaries to classical books is loaded with traditional views and often an old commentary must be read with new insight. Further, the commentators in their efforts were rarely lead by the motivation to reach an understanding which would be minimally conforming to the commentator’s own philoso- phy. On the contrary, the text served often as a launch pad for his own philo- sophical considerations. On the other hand, the results of lexicographic work by the commentators belong to the treasures of traditional Chinese philology and one has to pay a due attention to them. d) Concordances and electronic databases of OC texts. We assume that Classical Chinese was a common written communication tool of the edu- cated people of that time and that all classical texts are written in a language intelligible to the literal public of that time. Further we presume that the author of these texts were competent speakers and stylists and that they have