Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 578  David Sehnal Analysis of “full” words in Classical Chinese based on the Book of Laozi § 0. Foreword The book of Laozi does not serve too often as departing point for philo- logical studies in Classical Chinese. Despite of this fact, I tried to show that even this text which is often regarded as esoteric and mysterious, can be approached to with standard tools and methods within the framework of lan- guage analysis of other Classical texts or the Warring States period. The present contribution is based on my work “Book of Laozi . ATransla- tion with Philological Commentary”, which was published in 2013 in Prague. Its aim was to test the current philological procedures in terms of their ap- plicability to Laozi and to present the results in a transparent way, let them to manifest their overall validity for the Classical Chinese studies. Therefore it contains also a number of general and methodological considerations. The whole book consists of three main parts: Introduction, Commentary and Dictionary. In the Commentary, apart from the translation of the text of Laozi into the Czech language, I provided an explanation for practically every word in the text, which involves ca. 5000 entries of lexical and gram- matical commentary. These entries are further arranged under head charac- ters and individual lexemes. The present contribution is a summary of the key passages from the Intro- duction to the book where I explain my approaches and methods in analysing the lexicon of “full” words ( 實詞 shí cí ) of Classical Chinese. These principles were brought to me by my great teachers: S. E. Yakhontov, T. N. Nikitina, Guo Xiliang and Ch. Harbsmeier. Hereby I express my honest gratitude to them.