Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2020
Abstract
A comprehensive study of the vocabulary of the Yinwenzi text, which has been traditionally claimed to originate in pre-imperial times, but evinces clear traces of later language stages under closer inspection. The study focuses on the patterns of attestation of a wide range of selected lemmata in corpora of both Classical and Post-Classical Chinese.
The results of this comparison point to a very late date of composition of the text under question, although linguistic arguments can hardly ever be entirely conclusive.