Oracle bone script: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:46, 19 March 2024

Revision as of 09:41, 20 March 2024

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[[File:Chinese character Shang oracle 犬 quan3 dog.svg|upright=0.2|thumb|{{zhi|c=犬}} 'dog']]

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Despite the pictorial nature of the oracle bone script, it was a fully functional and mature writing system by the time of the Shang dynasty,{{sfnm|Boltz|1994|1p=31|Qiu|2000|2p=29}} meaning it was able to record the [[Old Chinese language]], and not merely fragments of ideas or words. This level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred years.{{efn|Boltz surmises that the Chinese script was invented around the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, i.e. very roughly ca. 1500 BC, in the early Shang, and based on the currently available evidence declares attempts to push this date earlier "unsubstantiated speculation and wishful thinking". {{harvnb|Boltz|1994|p=39}}}} From their presumed origins as pictographs and signs, by the Shang dynasty, most graphs were already conventionalized{{sfn|Boltz|1994|p=55}} in such a simplified fashion that the meanings of many of the pictographs are not immediately apparent. Compare, for instance, the pictographs atto the leftright. Without careful research to compare these to later forms, one would probably not know that these represented {{zhi|c=豕}} 'swine' and {{zhi|c=犬}} 'dog' respectively. As William G. Boltz notes, most of the oracle bone graphs are not depicted realistically enough for those who do not already know the script to recognize what they stand for; although pictographic ''in origin'' they are no longer pictographs {{em|in function}}. Boltz instead calls them ''zodiographs'', emphasizing their function as representing concepts exclusively through {{em|words}}.{{sfn|Boltz|1994|pp=31–33}} Similarly, Qiu labels them ''semantographs''.{{sfn|Qiu|2000|p=63}}

By the late Shang, oracle bone graphs had already evolved into mostly non-pictographic forms,{{Citation needed|date=May 2008}} including all the [[Chinese character classification|major types of Chinese characters]] now in use. Phonetic loan graphs, semantic-phonetic compounds, and associative compounds were already common. One structural and functional analysis of the oracle bone characters found that they were 23% pictographs, 2% simple indicatives, 32% associative compounds, 11% phonetic loans, 27% phonetic-semantic compounds, and 6% uncertain.{{efn|{{harvnb|Li|1968|p=95}}, cited in {{harvnb|Woon|1987}}; the percentages do not add up to 100% due to rounding; see [[Chinese character classification]] for explanations of the various types listed here.}}