“New Words” by Lu Jia: Towards a new translation and linguo-philological commentary

Abstract

In this paper, we offer a new Russian translation of and an extensive commentary on the frst chapter of “New Words” (Xīn yǔ), a Hàn-era treatise usually attributed to the intellectual Lu Jia. This text, frequently overlooked in the general perspective of Hàn philosophy, is actually of fundamental importance to the entire philosophical tradition of the Hàn period. Primary attention is paid to the commentary, compiled by the authors as a side project in the course of their work on a new type of dictionary for Classical Chinese; defned as having a “linguo-philological” nature, it combines elements of corpus analysis with linguistic analysis that takes into account the current state of knowledge of historical phonology, grammar, and lexicology of Old Chinese.