> On Friday, May 10, 2002, at 06:29 PM, John Cowan wrote: > > > What is this about Qing taboo characters? Can someone point me to an > > explanation (in English)? Thanks.
One source is Charles S. Gardner _Chinese Traditional Historiography_, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938, 2nd printing, 1961), pp. 82-84. I don't know how easy this book is to come by, so I put the relevant pages on the Web here: http://www.humancomp.org/misc/Gardner_82-85.pdf or http://www.humancomp.org/misc/Gardner_82-83.gif http://www.humancomp.org/misc/Gardner_84-85.gif Gardner (p.84, n.12) refers to other published works in Chinese, French, and German. In case you are curious, the odd romanization Gardner uses is a sui generis Wade-Giles, modified according to his own proposals back in the 30's. He specifically discusses the case of xu�n U+7384/U+248E5, which Thomas Chan cited, since it is the tabooed character with by far the most far-reaching impact, since it is a very common character, especially, as Gardner notes, in Daoist texts. More often than substituting U+248E5, Qing texts are likely to use yu�n U+5143 instead. An odd convention in China arose, perhaps as early as the late Han-early Tang period (ca. 0-700 C.E.), in which as a general courtesy to the literate public, emperors were given personal names which used relatively rare characters, so that common characters didn't have to be tabooed by millions of people. The problem with xu�n U+7384 was that, maybe because they were not-completely sinified Manchus, the Kangxi emperor's parents (or whoever chose his personal name), didn't adhere to this courtesy, and to further the inconvenience, the Qing dynasty in general and Kangxi's reign in particular were a period of tremendous activity in book publishing. Someone once observed that well over half of all extant texts published in the world before 1700(?) are in Chinese. On Saturday, May 11, 2002 7:27 PM, John H. Jenkins wrote: > The whole idea of "taboo" forms stems from the fact that there > are certain > ideographs one could not use because, typically, they're part of > personal > name of someone important. So one deliberately distorts them > when writing > them. "Someone important" includes your own lineal ancestors too. E.g., you would not write, or sometimes even speak, the personal given name of your father, or grandfather. > Such a thing is very much time-bound. Using a character from the > personal > name of the *current* emperor is a big deal, but using one from the > personal name of an emperor five hundred years dead from an entirely > different dynasty is no biggie. So the Qing dictionary, the > KangXi, would > have some taboo forms which would later become untaboo > (especially now, of > course, since nobody does that kind of thing anymore). The taboo on Confucius's given name had enough currency during the May 4th period (1920's) and the Cultural Revolution (late 1960's), that people relished breaking it by referring to him as Kong Qiu. I think it is likely that even today, especially in rural areas, there are people who honor the taboo on writing and speaking personal names of ancestors. Rick Kunst _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ The Humanities Computing Laboratory A Nonprofit Education and Research Corporation 301 W. Main St., Suite 400-I Durham, NC 27701 USA Tel. (919) 667-9556, (919) 656-5915 Fax: (919) 667-9556 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.humancomp.org _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
