History of Ancient Chinese Linguistics

Author: Deng Wenbin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-09-01
Features: Three, The Content and Format of Shuowen Jiezi
In the past, people believed that single strokes formed characters (wen), while combined strokes formed words (zi), so Shuowen Jiezi was interpreted as explaining the meaning of characters. Shuowen Jiezi is also commonly referred to as Shuowen. This text consists of fourteen volumes, plus a preface (xu mu), and the surviving version is the early Song Dynasty edition edited by Xu Xuan. Each volume is divided into two parts, making a total of thirty volumes. The entire book contains 9,353 main characters, 1,163 variant forms (chongwen), and 133,441 character explanations. The book organizes characters into 540 sections based on their form and radical structure, pioneering the radical arrangement system. The primary script used is small seal script, with ancient script and zhuowen variants listed as additional forms. Shuowen Jiezi groups characters with the same radical into one section (bu), which is then named after that radical placed at the beginning of the section, serving as the section's head radical. For example, characters like "tong," "bao," "ren," "qi," "ren," and "shi," which all contain the radical "ren," are grouped into the "ren" section, where "ren" becomes the head radical. Xu Shen used this method of categorizing characters by radical to classify over 9,000 characters into 540 radicals. As for the arrangement of the 540 radicals, it follows the sequence from the "yi" section to the "hai" section, or "beginning with yi and ending with hai." This arrangement is based on the materialist philosophy of the Yin-Yang and Five Elements school of thought during the Han Dynasty, which held that "all things are born from yi and conclude with hai." The order of the radicals is generally determined by their visual similarity, grouping radicals that are visually related together. For instance, "ye," "mian," and "shou" are grouped together, as are "you," "zu," and "zhi." As for the arrangement of characters within each section, it is based on their meaning, grouping characters with similar meanings together. For example, in the "ru" section: "huang," "shen," "fei," "pi," "gan," "dan," and "wei"; in the "yan" section: "shan," "ji," "wu," "fei," and "bang." Within each radical section, characters are primarily arranged by their semantic categories. For instance, the order in the "mu" section is roughly as follows: first, names of trees are listed, then parts of trees, and finally names of wooden products: "mu," "di," "gen," "mo," "guo," "quan," "zhi," "tiao," and "mei."