Chinese character culture interpretation

Author: He JinSong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-07-01
Features:
1. The cultural essence of Chinese characters is embedded in their form and original meaning. Explaining the origin of a character's form and meaning inevitably involves its cultural characteristics.
2. The book is divided into three volumes. Volume 1 contains 526 characters, which are those whose interpretations of form and meaning by Xu Shen are credible or basically credible. Volume 2 contains 262 characters, which are those corrected by later scholars for incorrect interpretations of form or meaning, or even those with entirely incorrect interpretations. Volume 3 contains 214 characters whose forms or original meanings remain unclear, or whose origins of form and meaning are both unknown. I have conducted new research on them. About half of the characters in this volume are from my book Studies on the Origins of Chinese Character Forms and Meanings, with revisions and omissions combined here. The other more than 100 characters' origins of form and meaning are from research conducted in 1998 and 1999, and to save space, the views of various scholars are generally not or rarely cited.
3. The character entries in each volume are arranged according to the order of Shuowen Jiezi.
4. Each character entry is followed by its pronunciation. After the pronunciation is the original text from Shuowen Jiezi.
5. The characters explained indicate their structural types. The structural types of Chinese characters remain undetermined.
6. The ancient scripts used and example sentences are from the following books: Oracle Bone Inscriptions Collection (abbreviated as He), Xiaotun South Oracle Bones (abbreviated as Tun), Whitney's Collection of Oracle Bones (abbreviated as Hui), British Collection of Oracle Bones (abbreviated as Ying). Gold inscriptions are cited from Compendium of Gold Inscriptions and Collection of Shang and Zhou Gold Inscriptions. Ancient scripts, Zou script, and seal script are cited from Shuowen Jiezi. Other ancient scripts are from Comprehensive Dictionary of Chinese.
7. For easier understanding of the meaning of example sentences, annotations are marked in parentheses after some characters.
8. Quotations follow the original text.
9. Missing characters in oracle bone inscriptions and omitted words in quoted sentences are marked with ellipses, following current conventions in relevant works.
10. Quotations from the main reference books listed are not annotated with versions in the notes.