| Abstract |
The songbooks written in south-min dialect of Taiwan are important records representing the folk literature and written language of Taiwaness. These songbooks are quite popular in a century ago. Characters in those songbooks are elements in research of Chinese worlds. This article is based on a ballad, which describes the leading players sing praises mutually in a ceremony of calling down a ghost. The ballad is consisted of 752 sentences, totally 5264 words. I outline 150 examples, and classify them into three groups: (a)the original characters, (b)characters of Kundoku (訓讀), (c)phonetic loan characters, and (d)new coins. There are 121 examples of characters with phonetic loan, which account for 80.6%. And there are 22 examples of Kundoku, which account for 15% only. It is obviously that Taiwanese songbooks are primarily composed of phonetic loan characters. It was quite similar to the situation in ancient China, as characters were interchangeable with others. The fact reflected that compilers of those songbooks were short on resources of original characters. The usage of Kundoku cannot impair the nature of Chinese characters as expressed by sounds. Original Chinese characters and Kundoku are basically worlds expressed by meaning. However, they must be compensated with phonetic loan characters for the insufficiency of words expressed by meaning. I try to analyze the relationship among the four groups of character. I also abstract some special syntax as examples. I believe that it will be useful for the reconstruction of worlds and the usage of words in Taiwanese songbooks.
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| Keyword |
Ballad, songbook, South-min dialect of Taiwan, The original characters, Kundoku, Phonetic loan characters, Coins, Special words |
