Law-reading
Law-reading (法訓, pjap-hljunh, or 律訓, rjut-hljunh) is a set of rules, established in Themiclesia around the start of the common era, to clarify law codes by giving the "proper reading" (正訓) of often-confused words.
Basis
State-formation in Themiclesia spanned many centuries from the first Meng settlements and worksites possibly as early as 10th c. BCE to the attestation of autocratic states in the 4th c. BCE. Laws, where they existed, were originally not committed to writing, but arbitrarily applied by the aristocracy. After the Menghean trend of legalism, multiple Themiclesian states also began to codify laws around 300 BCE. In the epigraphic tradition, legal condices were written with only the phonetic complement, without semantic determinatives. Though the application of phonetic complement was governed by strict rules that mondern linguists have confirmed, some phonetic changes also occurred during this period that the basis for selecting some phonetic complement (and therefore interpreting the word they represented) was lost.
- For example, the character 每 represented the following syllables: me′ (married woman), m′e′ (sea), m′es (instruct), mjel′ (agility), and m-mjal (complexity). As will appear, the character could represent any syllable with the sequence me, and any variation in its onset manner of articulation.
- For a more severe example, 各 could be read as following: klak (各, "each"), k′rak (客, "guest"), krak (格, "arrival"), N-grjak > rjak (略, "schema"), N-graks (路, "road"), N-glaks (露, "dew"), N-glaks (輅, "carriage"), and N-glaks (鷺, "heron"). But by the 1st c. BCE, any voiced consonant preceding a liquid had dropped, meaning that many of these words bore very little similarity to the phonetic complement chosen to write them. 各 was used to write any character with the nucleus kak.
It was often necessary to judge from context the of a character to understand the written law correctly. While the easier option would have been to include determiners in legal codes, the court instead published explanatory texts to legal codices. These explanations not only defined words but also gave their proper pronunciations and, in the event of disagreement between officials opinions, had the force of law itself. In the 3rd c. CE, jurists compiled an anthology of these explanatory texts; by that point, primary and explanatory legislation had, together, encompassed some 400,000 scrolls. Contemporaries complain of "the vastness of the law", for which cross-references to eliminate ambiguities and art of indexing laws were each professions. Themiclesian officials were expected to master the general statues and know in detail those that pertained to their jurisdictions. For this they were called mjen-pjap-rjegh (文法吏), "officials of text and law".