瑞典傑出漢學家高本漢〈詩經注釋〉一書提出「反對書生氣」、 「儘量採用常見 意義」、「不任意改字改讀」、「儘量以先秦文獻為證」、「講求證據」、「儘量不用假借 訓釋」、「反對將難講字都說成語詞」等訓詁原則，企圖以現代語言學的方法，糾正王念孫 、馬瑞辰等清代學者訓釋錯誤。雖然高氏之訓詁原則，可謂一般訓詁通則，然因其在訓釋過 程中過於堅持原則，不僅忽視訓詁專業知識的應用，得出極不可能的異常訓釋結果，也往往 將清儒說得很好的訓解，反而說得更壞。本文以其「堅持採用常見意義」、「堅持先秦文籍 證例」兩項訓詁原則為例，分別例舉高氏書中所犯錯誤若干條，說明為古籍作訓釋工作，除 了具備客觀態度外，還須充份發揮文字、音韻、訓詁、詞彙、語法等相關專業知識，才能得 到通達的訓釋結果。 In Glosses on the Book of Odes (GBO) the outstanding swedish sinologist Karlgren proposes a set of philological principles such as (1) guard against bookishness, (2) making the best use of common meanings, (3) not tampering with the original characters and reading, (4) setting priority on taking the pre-Qin documents as textual evidence, (5) laying stress on attested examples, (6) avoiding textual analysis in terms of loan characters and (7) resisting the temptation to paraphrase abstruse characters. Armed with the method of modern linguistics he attempts to correct the textual misinterpretations of such Qing scholars as Niansun Wang and Ruichen Ma. Although Karlgren's principles can be agreed on as general principles of textual critique, there are untoward consequences if these principles are blindly followed. In the insistence of his principles he not only neglects the professional knowledge of textual critique and as a result yields outlandish and utterly improbable interpretations, but also commit gross errors in places where the Qing scholars gave judicious interpretations. This paper critically examines Karlgren's two principles of textual critique, namely (1) adherence to common meanings and (2) the insistence on the textual evidence of the pre-qin documents and for each principle examples are provided to show several items where the errors are made in GBO. The purpose of this discussion is to show that over and above an objective attitude the task of a philological study and proper interpretation of old texts can better be achieved if one can pool the combined benefit of a range of professional knowledge such as writing, phonology, textual critique, lexicon and grammar.
