The Book of Expletives () written by

Wang Yinzhi Wang Yinzhi (; 1766–1834) a Qing dynasty philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties t ...

() is a book in ten volumes that analyzes the function of words in

classical Chinese Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...

texts.Cheung, Kam-siu, 2011, "New Evidence for the Authorship of Jingyi Shuwen and Jingzhuan Shici". Qinghua xuebao 41.2.

Background

Modern Chinese Standard Chinese ( zh, s=现代标准汉语, t=現代標準漢語, p=Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ, l=modern standard Han speech) is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949). ...

and

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...

are distinctly different. Even though some of the

writing Writing is the act of creating a persistent representation of language. A writing system includes a particular set of symbols called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which they encode a particular spoken language. Every written language ...

may be the same, grammar, sentence structure and meanings of words in their cultural context changed over time and may make Chinese classics difficult if not impossible to understand. ''The Book of Expletives'' serves as an interpretation of classical Chinese texts in modern terms.

References

{{wikisourcelang, zh, 經傳釋詞 Chinese classic texts Standard Chinese Classical Chinese