On Cognitive Strategy of Ideographic Writing

Abstract

Ideographic writings, such as Chinese characters, do not lay stress onthe pronunciation of characters. However, the so-called function of indicating meaning was reduced in the long history of evolution. Then a question arose that whetherit is necessary to maintain such complex structures for modern writings. The main structural type of Chinese character system has become the “semanto-phonetic structure” long before.

Keywords

Chu Bamboo-slip scripts, semanto-phonetic structure, cognitive classification

Introduction

Searching database of Chu Bamboo-slipscripts of the Warring states, we can find that many ideographic structures, which arepresent or absentin Shuowen jiezi, are transformed into semanto-phonetic structures with addition of new components. The following examples of Chu Bamboo-slipscripts are chosen to illustrate this phenomenon.

The orthograph(a graph expressing its original meaning) of服as “fucong服从(to obtain)”: /

In Ziyi缁衣manuscript from the Guodian collection, there is a character “”. The annotators interpreted it as the structure based on “li力” and “pu攴”. While the quotation in Ziyi manuscript fromShanghaiMuseum collection is:

诗员：仪型文王，万邦作?.

The Book of Songs says, “Take pattern from King Wen, all states will obey you then.”1

Table 1.

Bronze Inscriptions in Western Zhou Dynasty / Chu Bamboo and Silk manuscripts texts
Type of structure / Character number / Proportion of character form / Totalnumber of characters / Proportion of character frequency / Character number / Proportion of character form / Total number of characters / Proportion of character frequency
xiangxing / 324 / 9.57% / 29326 / 51.64% / 203 / 4.56% / 15735 / 25.15%
zhishi / 42 / 1.24% / 2266 / 3.99% / 51 / 1.16% / 8231 / 13.16%
huiyi / 1037 / 30.64% / 11178 / 19.68% / 549 / 12.45% / 13861 / 22.16%
xingsheng / 1981 / 58.54% / 14018 / 24.68% / 3610 / 81.84% / 24733 / 39.53%

Acknowledgements

Many thanks for the cooperation from Prof. XXX

Funding

This work is supported by XXXX plan “XXXX” (grant number: NNNNN).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

  1. Translated sentencesfromThe Book of Songs are based on Xu YC tans许渊冲译. (2009)Shijing: Hanyingduizhao诗经：汉英对照. Beijing: Zhongguo duiwai fanyi chuban gongsi. While sentence from Shangshu are translated by James Legge, to see: Legge J and Zhou BJ trans理雅各英译、周秉钧今译. (2013) Shangshu: yinghanduizhao尚书：英汉对照. Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe.

References

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