The Semantic Entanglement and Quantifier Usage of “Ben”, “Gen”, and “Zhu” การพัวพันเชิงความหมายและการใช้คำลักษณนาม “เปิ่น” “เกิน” และ “จู”

Abstract

This paper first sorts out and analyses the semantic entanglement of the words “Ben”, “Gen”, and “Zhu” related to the meaning of “tree root” in ancient Chinese and shows that the three are closely related. Specifically, the original meaning of “Ben” is “tree root”, which includes the main part close to the tree root; then, the “Gen” representing the “tree trunk” in the soil and the "Zhu" representing the “tree trunk” on the soil, respectively, replaced the “tree trunk” part of “Ben”, which originally referred to both “tree root” and “tree trunk”, while “Ben” only referred to “tree root”. Subsequently, the “Gen” of the “tree trunk” part in the soil completely gave way to the “Zhu” and took over the meaning of “Ben”. Then paper discusses the usage of quantifiers for the three, and also discusses the usage of quantifiers for “Shu” and “Ke”, all of which are based on corpus retrieval. Regarding the usage of the three quantifiers, this paper shows that “Ben” was first used to measure herbaceous plants, possibly no later than the      Pre-Qin period. The “Shu” that emerged later was more active in the Han Dynasty, as its noun meaning was generated only after the emergence of the quantifier meaning, and was replaced by “Zhu” and “Gen” during the Six Dynasties. “Zhu” and “Gen” were mainly used to measure herbaceous plants in the Six Dynasties, and were replaced by “Ke”, which also became the main unit of measurement of woody plants and has been active in modern Chinese.