Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
I have placed it in my wish list. Hope you will do a review of the book when you receive ithmesker said:But of course I immediately ordered his new book. Can't wait to have it.
That might be the case now, but it was not so in the early days of writing. Oracle bone inscriptions have hardly any systemization or limitation to the used components, they just drew what they needed to convey the appropriate meaning. There are recurring elements like the sign for man, woman, roof, house, etc., but there are also a lot of OBI characters which will never fit in a predefined scheme of radicals (of a lot of these charactes we don't know the modern equivalent). The same goes for bronze inscriptions. The 金文引得, a 2-volume index to more than 7000 bronze inscriptions, gives characters which have no current equivalent, and of which they were not able to convert them to a modern looking character using known components.ewald said:The Chinese characters are built from a limited set of basic characters.
Ehrm, okay, but what is your point? Anyway, on the site you mention you can only look up modern characters, it is impossible to lookup a OBI or BI character that does not have a modern equivalent. If you check an oracle bone inscription dictionary like the 新編甲骨文字典 or 甲骨文字典, you will see that there are a lot of characters which would not fit any system using radicals.ewald said:But how about the characters used in the Zhouyi? I certainly haven't checked thoroughly, but my general impression from consulting www.chineseetymology.org is that lots of the old forms do have some resemblance to the modern characters as they show up on my computer screen.
Okay, but what does that have to do with 'characters being made of a fixed amount of components"?Also, the Shuowen texts that that site displays, renders fine for 95% of the characters (some codes in the text make me think that the remaining 5% doesn't).
Yes, they were. That is already apparent in the Chujian bamboo manuscripts which, although younger, use a kind of writing which to me looks very similar to OBI. I assume the first Yi used a similar kind of writing, or something that was close to bronze inscriptions.But I wouldn't be surprised if the characters as they were at the time of the Zhouyi were actually more ideographic than they are now.
A whale? My god, why didn't 綠色和平 intervene?!lindsay said:I don't think the various areas were necessarily as isolated as you suggest. Did you know, for example, that a Shang OBI was found inscribed on a whale scapula? They didn't pull that baby out of the Yellow River.
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).