earticle

영어

While there have been many different dynasties over the Chinese long history, Han-dynasty could be seen to have had so huge an influence on the Han Character cultural sphere of East Asia in language, culture, politics, ideologies and others, considering the representation of ‘漢(Han)’ in the names such as 漢字(Han characters), 漢語(Han language) and 漢族(Han Chinese). In this regard, we should focus on Han era, not only because during this era many of the basic concepts of culture and philosophy maintaining and sustaining East Asian culture have been established and solidified, but also because its influence has still been alive and well in the modern Eastern cultural area. Among every sort of history, it must be history of language that linguists should pay most attention to. Examples and cultural connotations of vocabulary which constructs language are critical cues that help understand the culture and the lifestyle of the society back then. It is especially important to understand that there are various intentions and purposes in connotations in language. This is because language is no more than a sign or symbol to represent things, and therefore a world expressed in form of language is already not an actual being but a result of one's subjective and limited perceptions, but in general we still perceive the meaning of the linguistic sign and its referent to be the same. Such mechanism between linguistic signs and their referents has often been taken over by power and ideologies and induced to perceive and understand things towards the direction they wanted. In this sense, ‘聲訓法(law of the Analogy of Meaning from Fhoneme)’ generates a close homogeneity between the signifier and the signified using the ‘poetic function’ of Chinese characters. 『釋名』 interprets Chinese characters mostly in a way of ‘聲訓法’, and is a representative lexicon of Han period. Hence, this study aims at examining the reasoning and the world view of Han time suggested in the interpretation of 『釋名』. This research primarily focuses on the vocabulary relating to topography. ‘中國(China)’, one of our closely related neighboring country, has its very name reflecting their own geographical idea, and this point seemed meaningful to begin with to understand China. The coverage of this study includes four categories, ｢釋地｣, ｢釋山｣, ｢釋水｣, ｢釋丘｣ in 『釋名』.