A brief discussion of “Fanxun” word of Chinese

Fanxun word is the old topic of Chinese ancient semantic topic, it refers to one word has the contrast meanings, Fanxun is one kind of antisense extended, as the common semantic change, it happens in many languages around the world. Take Chinese for example:

        沽酒   [ku³³tɕiu²¹⁴]，buy wine, “沽” is translated into “buy”

        待价而沽  [tai⁵¹tɕa:⁵¹ɚ²⁵ku³³]，wait till the high price to sale, “沽” is translated into “sale” here.

       As early as dynasty Jin (A.D.265－316), Guo Pu, the most famous writer,  exegesis of Jin,  who had interpreted  <Er Ya> ( The first Poetry book Ancient Chinese), and mentioned that “meaning contrasting but kanemichi” and “never bad to named beauty and evil in a same word”,  he even invented Fanxun which used the contrasting meanings in the same word to interpret words.

        The most important reason of forming Fanxun word is that some entities contain two contrasting characters. During the word change progress, word meaning was extended continuously, The meaning which was extended by different methods, became asymmetric, relative or contrast, then leaded to one word has two contrast meaning. For example, “承” in Chinese, original meaning of “承” is “give, afford; receive, accept”. From the word from of this word, it refers that “ three hands holding a seal”, it contains two behaviors in this interpretion, one is stable, holding the seal without movement; another one is giving the seal to other person, it is in a dynamic state. Accord to these two behaviors of body, meaning change could be more reasonable, it could change from the aspect of giver, and also could change from the aspect of receiver. So that, the meaning of  “承”  has two contrasted side.

        Beside, the content of a word is diversity, it  increase the possibilities of extending lexemes. In the progress of semantic change, the meaning of a word can select the original meaning or the additional annexations of the meaning. For example,  “乱” it means “govern” and “disorder”. But after the semantic change, “乱” left only the meaning of “disorder” .