Outline of Oracle Bone Text Philology

Author: Zhao Cheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features:
Old-style textual studies primarily focused on small seal script, with little or no discussion of oracle bone script, or only minimal introductions. Modern textual studies cover everything, including oracle bone script. However, due to the involvement of all types of Chinese characters, the discussion of oracle bone script is quite insufficient. There are also specialized books on oracle bone script, but they exhibit two serious tendencies. One is to emphasize archaeological and oracle bone studies related to oracle bone script, such as excavation, cataloging, dating, reconstruction, and authentication, as the main content. This leaves readers with little practical or theoretical understanding of oracle bone script after reading the book. The other tendency is to dedicate significant space to explaining the specific usage of certain oracle bone characters and annotating some divination inscriptions, similar to a selected reading of oracle bone script. This approach results in a double failure. On one hand, it fails to provide a comprehensive and in-depth theoretical introduction to oracle bone script. On the other hand, it falls short of serving as a textbook for recognizing characters or reading divination inscriptions.
There are also some textual studies or Chinese character studies that mention oracle bone script, but due to insufficient research on the dating of various Chinese characters, the description of oracle bone script lacks completeness and systematicity, and the historical development of oracle bone script remains unclear. Consequently, theoretical analysis and discussion are naturally not in-depth. To address this situation and push academic research toward a more scientific and practical path, the best approach would be to compile a comprehensive Oracle Bone Studies that covers excavation, dating, reconstruction, cataloging, and authentication of oracle bones. A Selected Oracle Bone Script or Oracle Bone Inscriptions Reader should be created by selecting and categorizing the main content of Shang Dynasty inscriptions. A Dictionary of Oracle Bone Characters or Oracle Bone Lexicon should be compiled by consolidating and selecting explanations of oracle bone characters and words. Additionally, a Linguistic Study of Oracle Bone Script should be written from a linguistic perspective to explore theoretical issues in Chinese character studies. Moreover, the experience, lessons, methods, principles, achievements, and problems accumulated over decades in deciphering oracle bone script should be thoroughly summarized, preferably combined with the history of oracle bone script research, to create a monograph.
Theoretically speaking, this book should be titled An Outline of the Linguistics of Oracle Bone Script, as it is a diachronic textual study. However, due to the lack of comprehensive dating research on various Chinese character systems, many issues remain unexplored, and some key historical threads still need to be connected. Also, since the number of confirmed oracle bone characters is limited, and the understanding of their planar relationships is insufficient, the discussion of oracle bone script in various aspects can only be outline-based. Therefore, the book is titled An Outline of the Linguistics of Oracle Bone Script.
Although An Outline of the Linguistics of Oracle Bone Script is a diachronic textual study, it touches upon major issues related to the origin, nature, and structure of Chinese characters. By synthesizing and systematically organizing the material used, exploring the patterns of structure, usage, and development of oracle bone script, and rigorously examining key issues in Chinese character studies—such as original characters, primordial characters, archaic characters, loan characters, and original meanings—along with the practical context of oracle bone script, the book presents new materials and perspectives on various issues. It is hoped that the research findings in this book will contribute to addressing the shortcomings of diachronic research on Chinese characters, deepening the study of the historical development of Chinese characters, promoting the compilation of diachronic textual studies such as Linguistics of Bronze Inscriptions and Linguistics of Warring States Characters, enhancing theoretical exploration of Chinese characters, and enriching the content of Chinese textual studies.