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

 580  David Sehnal   word in the text can carry out almost any function, the differences between word classes are completely erased (and obscured). Classical Chinese thus appears to be a more or less amorphous language where almost everything is allowed, nothing can be convincingly attested or disputed. With such method the most reliable way seems to rely upon the old commentaries and to believe that commentators thanks to their erudition and more or less living tradition have understood the difficult spots in the text correctly. That is what Harb- smeier calls ‘crib hidden under one’s desk’. It is evident that doing so one just recycles what has been said or written many times before. Except of some archeological findings of Old Chinese texts, the development in the field of Old Chinese philology only relatively modest. No wonder that some people tend to look upon Old Chinese studies as rigid or even dead discipline. Avery substantial breakthrough in this situation is the project of Thesaurus Linguae Seriae (TLS) database. In the TLS database there is for example 1386 different syntactic cat- egories registered. This number itself documents a huge structural diversity of Old Chinese which the traditional methods of description are unable to notice. Such detailed apparatus enables generating of new grammatical rules, develops in the reader the necessary sensitivity towards various syntactic phenomena, as well as towards the concrete semantic contents of different syntactic categories. It is thus a great progress in comparison to the prevailing “intuitive” reading, when we ‘are often uncertain how it comes to mean what apparently it does mean’. TLS enables to treat the current readings based on commentaries critically with solid fundament of registered linguistic facts. Moreover, thanks to its universal method of analysis it enables to compare directly the modern Pekinese idiolect with Shang Oracle Bones Inscriptions and find continuity over the whole history of the Chinese language. (In my book I am using for sake of greater pedagogical compatibility my own sys- tem of description of the grammar of Laozi which is based on, but is more simple than the system of TLS in 2013.) In this work a great importance is put to the semantics of OC “full” words. It is worrying that at the beginning of 21th century one has still sometimes to stress the fact that not the character , but the word is the basic syntactic unit of Old Chinese. A Chinese character as artefact of the Chi- nese script itself is free of any pronunciation and meaning. In other words, one has not to ask what this or that character means, but how this or that word was written. Fascination of the traditional Chinese philology as well as a number of Western sinologists with Chinese characters is one of the rea- sons why we still know so little about the identity of OC words. A share of responsibility for this state has also a long-lasting misunderstanding of the