Tongwen through Shared Meanings:Wang Chutong's Yan Ya and the Multilingual Space-Time of Academic Circle during Qianlong and Jiaqing Period
The 42 volume manuscripts of Yan Ya by Wang Chutong(1730-1821),preserved in the National Library of China,remains largely unknown to date.The work organizes lexical entries according to the philological tradition of Erya.Each entry not only lists Chinese synonyms following the format of character books.In addition,it also draws extensively from transliteration records such as Jilin Leishi and Bahong Yishi,and incorporates frontier vocabularies from Wang's own compilation Xiyu Erya,derived from Xiyu Tongwen Zhi.This dual aspect interweaves temporal and spatial dimensions,as well as the philological tradition with cross-regional languages.Basing on the extensive revisions and textual layers within the manuscript,this paper examines the source management and composition process of Yan Ya.As a scholar from southern China without special language background,Wang Chutong crafted a spatial-temporal tapestry of multilingual lexical categories through extensive textual references.In this way,the work provided a distinctive textual response to philological pattern of the Qianlong and Jiaqinig period under the perspective of"tongwen".
philological traditionregional languagesspatial-temporal dimensions of text
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