Erya

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The Erya (Traditional Chinese: 爾雅; Simplified Chinese: 尔雅; Hanyu Pinyin: Ěryǎ; Wade-Giles: Erh-ya) is the oldest extant Chinese dictionary. Bernhard Karlgren (1931: 49) concluded that "the major part of its glosses must reasonably date from" the 3rd century BC.

Chinese scholars interpret the first title character er" (爾; "you, your; adverbial suffix") as a phonetic loan character for the homophonous er (邇; "near; close; approach"), and believe the second ya (雅; "proper; correct; refined; elegant") refers to words or language. According to W. South Coblin (1993: 94): "The interpretation of the title as something like 'approaching what is correct, proper, refined' is now widely accepted." It has been translated as "The Literary Expositor," "The Ready Rectifier" (both by James Legge), and "Progress Towards Correctness" (A. von Rosthorn).

The book's author is unknown. Although it is traditionally attributed to the Duke of Zhou, Confucius, or his disciples, scholarship suggests that someone compiled and edited diverse glosses from commentaries to pre-Qin texts, especially the Shijing. The Erya was considered the authoritative lexicographic guide to Chinese classic texts during the Han Dynasty, and it was officially categorised as one of the Thirteen Confucian Classics during the Song Dynasty. The best-known textual annotations include the Western Jin Dynasty Erya zhu (爾雅注; "Erya Commentary") by Guo Pu (276-324 CE), the Northern Song Dynasty Erya shu (爾雅疏; "Erya Subcommentary") by Xing Bing (邢昺; 931-1010), the Song Dynasty Eryayi (爾雅翼; "Wings to the Erya") by Luo Yuan (羅願; 1136-1184), and the Qing Dynasty Erya zhengyi (爾雅正義; "Correct Meanings of the Erya") by Shao Jinhan (邵晋涵; 1743-1796) and Erya yishu (爾雅義疏 "Subcommentary on Meanings of the Erya") by Hao Yixing (郝懿行; 1757-1825).

The Erya has been described as a dictionary, glossary, synonymicon, thesaurus, and encyclopaedia. Karlgren (1931: 46) explains that the book "is not a dictionary in abstracto, it is a collection of direct glosses to concrete passages in ancient texts." The received text contains 2094 entries, covering about 4300 words, and a total of 13,113 characters. It is divided into nineteen sections, the first of which is subdivided into two parts. The title of each chapter combines shi ("explain; elucidate") with a term describing the words under definition. Seven chapters (4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 18, and 19) are organized into taxonomies. For instance, chapter 4 defines terms for: paternal clan (宗族), maternal relatives (母黨), wife's relatives (妻黨), and marriage (婚姻). The text is divided between the first three heterogeneous chapters defining abstract words and the last sixteen semantically-arranged chapters defining concrete words. The last seven – concerning grasses, trees, insects and reptiles, fish, birds, wild animals, and domestic animals – describe more than 590 kinds of flora and fauna. It is a valuable document of natural history and historical biogeography.

Contents 1 Contents 2 See also 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Contents

Chapter	Chinese	Pinyin	Translation	Subject
1	釋詁	Shigu	Explaining Old Words	verbs, adjectives, adverbs, grammatical particles
2	釋言	Shiyan	Explaining Words	verbs, adjectives, adverbs
3	釋訓	Shixun	Explaining Instructions	adjectives, adverbs, mostly with reduplication
4	釋親	Shiqin	Explaining Relatives	kinship, marriage
5	釋宮	Shigong	Explaining Dwellings	architecture, engineering
6	釋器	Shiqi	Explaining Utensils	tools, weapons, clothing, and their uses
7	釋樂	Shiyue	Explaining Music	music, musical instruments, dancing
8	釋天	Shitian	Explaining Heaven	astronomy, astrology, meteorology, calendar
9	釋地	Shidi	Explaining Earth	geography, geology, some regional lore
10	釋丘	Shiqiu	Explaining Hills	topography, Fengshui terms
11	釋山	Shishan	Explaining Mountains	mountains, famous mountains
12	釋水	Shishui	Explaining Rivers	rivers, navigation, irrigation, boating
13	釋草	Shicao	Explaining Plants	grasses, herbs, grains, vegetables
14	釋木	Shimu	Explaining Trees	trees, shrubs, some botanical terms
15	釋蟲	Shichong	Explaining Insects	insects, spiders, reptiles, etc.
16	釋魚	Shiyu	Explaining Fishes	fish, amphibians, crustaceans, reptiles, etc.
17	釋鳥	Shiniao	Explaining Birds	wildfowl, ornithology
18	釋獸	Shishou	Explaining Beasts	wild animals, legendary animals
19	釋畜	Shichu	Explaining Domestic Animals	livestock, pets, poultry, some zoological terms

In the history of Chinese lexicography, nearly all dictionaries were internally organized with systems of character radicals, first introduced in the Shuowen Jiezi. However, a few notable exceptions followed the Erya's arrangement by semantic categories like Heaven and Earth. The Ming Dynasty scholar Lang Kuijin (郎奎金) categorized and published the Wuya (五雅 "Five [Er]yas"): Erya, Xiao Erya ("Little Erya"), Guangya ("Expanded Erya"), Piya ("Increased Erya"), and Yìyǎ ("Lost Erya" or the Shiming). Chinese leishu (Chinese: 類書; Wade-Giles: lei-shu; "reference works arranged by categories; encyclopedias"), such as the Yongle Encyclopedia, were also semantically arranged.

Owing to its laconic lexicographical style, the Erya is the only Chinese classic that has not been fully translated into English. However, there are several unpublished PhD dissertations translating particular chapters.

[edit] See also

• Xiao Erya
• Shiming
• Guangya
• Piya

[edit] References

• Coblin, W. South. (1993). "Erh ya" in Michael Loewe (ed.), Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, pp 94–99 (Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China) ISBN 1-55729-043-1.
• Karlgren, Bernhard. (1931). "The Early History of the Chou Li and Tso Chuan Texts". Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 3: 1–59.
• Von Rosthorn, A. (1975). The Erh-ya and Other Synonymicons. Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 10.3, 137–145.

[edit] External links

• The Erya Complete text in Chinese
• The Erya 爾雅 Dictionary, Chinaknowledge article
• Erh-ya, rare Song Dynasty edition, National Palace Museum