Dai Dongyuan zhuan yu shi bu 戴東原轉語釋補 [Supplement to Dai Dongyuan's Explanations of Turned Words]

Two vols. 8vo, orig. printed wrappers, orig. stitching. [China]: Haishi bianyi ju 海事編譯局, 1929.




First edition of this study of a phonological text by 18th-century thinker Dai Zhen 戴震 (1724-77, style name Dongyuan 東原). "Dai Zhen began life as a nobody. But he nevertheless managed to seize the attention of Beijing's cognoscenti in 1755, and for over a decade he was the intellectual toast of the Lower Yangzi Delta" (Hu, China's Transition to Modernity). Dai Zhen died young, and several of his writings were posthumously published, including a phonological work called "Shenglei biao" 聲類表 ["Charts on the Categories of Sounds"]. Separately, the posthumous collection included a text called "Zhuanyu ershi zhang xu" 轉語二十章序 ["Preface to 20 paragraphs on turned words"]. Yet the text to which this Preface belonged was gone. It has not surfaced since, and it is unclear if it was ever written. Zeng Guangyuan, as told by his friend Zhou Zhaoyuan 周兆沅 in a Preface to our book, had one day been reading the "Charts on the Categories of Sounds" and exclaimed, "Dongyuan's [i.e., Dai Zhen] 'turned words', aren't they the 'Charts on the Categories of Sounds'?" Our book contains Zeng's understanding of what Dai could have meant by his "turned words."


Zeng Guangyuan taught at China University 中國大學, a Republican-era private university that was closed down after the founding of the PRC. Zeng moreover published a work on rhyme table studies (Xu, Chuantong yuyanxue cidian, 559).


Fine set.


❧ Fang Chaoying. "Tai Chên." Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1644-1912). Vol. 2. Edited by Arthur W. Hummel. G.P.O, 1944. Hu, Minghui. China's Transition to Modernity: The New Classical Vision of Dai Zhen. University of Washington Press, 2015. Xu Jialu 许嘉璐, ed. Chuantong yuyanxue cidian 传统语言学辞典. Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1990.