Caractères interdits et vocabulaire officiel sous les Qin : l’apport des documents administratifs de Liye

Abstract

Qin taboo characters and official vocabulary New light from Qin documents from Liye. Qin documents from Liye represent the most important corpus of Qin written materials that has been excavated since the beginning of the 20th century. Before the forthcoming publication of the entire corpus, the author discusses here, on the basis of a number of documents that have already been published, certain problems related to the use of taboo characters and the standardization of vocabulary during the Qin dynasty. Many contemporary scholars consider it an established fact that the use of characters such as zheng 正 , zheng 政 and Chu 楚 was forbidden during the Qin dynasty because of the taboo on the personal names of the First Emperor and his father, the king Zhuangxiang. But the huge quantities of Qin documents that have already been excavated do not support such an assertion. Among the Liye documents, we find a wooden tablet that helps us understand the process of standardization concerning the vocabulary used by the Qin empire’s officials. The author considers that features which were interpreted as traces of the prohibition of certain characters in Qin texts should in fact be understood as part of the vocabulary used in Qin even before 221 B. C. He also stresses that many innovations that were for a long time attributed to the unification of the empire appear today as already extant at the end of the Warring States period.