Chinese Language Learning – Peeking into the ancient Shang society via the pictograms of the oracle bone scripts

6 Comments

1. GrillOrBeGrilled December 6, 2022

   Just like with Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters are *not* pictograms more often than they *are.* For example…

   * 食 is actually a phono-semantic character. The lower part is indeed a bowl on a stand, but the “roof” is actually a 亼, suggesting the pronunciation.
   * ~~舞 is a phono-semantic character. The top gives the pronunciation, and the bottom indicates “steps.”~~ CORRECTION: It seems that 無 was originally a pictogram of a dancer, as you described. When its meaning shifted to “not” (borrowed for sound), 舞 took its place meaning *dance.* 無 was re-borrowed for its sound in the new character that has its original meaning, and 舛 was added to denote steps.
   * 樂 is an ideogram, rather than a pictogram, composed of 糸 (“string”) and 木 (“wood”), suggesting a musical instrument.
   * 藥 is a phono-semantic character, nothing to do with shamanism. The 艹 on top indicates plants (as in herbal medicine), and the 樂 suggests the pronunciation.
   * 會 has no mouths or roof: it’s a pot with a lid.
   * 示 is an altar, nothing descending from above.
   * 福 is phono-semantic. Left side suggests the meaning, right side suggests the pronunciation.
   * 家 is phono-semantic, unless it’s a family of pigs under the roof.
2. Clevererer December 6, 2022

   It is fascinating!

   But it’s easy and tempting to get carried away.

   But you did say **secretly contain**, so let’s be generous with that interpretation.

   Think of the letter A. Originally a Phoenician pictogram (ox head) pre-dates oracle bones by 500 years, still in common use today. How much of its original meaning is recognizable in today’s usage? Absolutely none. The A today has no plausible secret meaning passed down from the ages. So that’s one extreme, now take a character like 火 . You could say *broadly* it carried the *concept* of fire, like a drawing from ancient times until now, moreso than with the letter A.

   But there’s a lot more to consider. u/GrillOrBeGrilled explained one major complication.

   The other is that to have any point at all, you’d have to begin with an understanding of the original script in context. That’s very difficult, and very different from what you’re doing. It’s what archaeologists fight over. Even that A story I just told is contested, and probably wrong, lol

   But your’s is a commonly wrong approach. We all like packing our bags with modern clothes, traveling back in time, and dressing up barely post-lithic people. It’s fun, but probably unfair. What I mean is…

   >What I see is a patriarchal, shamanistic society that gathered to eat together from the same cauldron, gave offerings to grain gods, played music with drums, and viewed women’s submission and confinement as ideal.

   Are those ideas maybe too complex for you to see directly in the characters, unless you went looking for them? The clothes don’t really fit. Not to be harsh, it’s all still very interesting. But I think the social details you mention come mostly from the field of archaeology, not the characters. And some of the archaeology changes often, the interpretation of it changes more often, and those all change the things we’re naturally prone to look for in the characters.
3. hanguitarsolo December 6, 2022

   You’re right that Shang culture was shamanistic, and in some regions such as Chu continued that shamanistic culture until the Warring States period (you can read Chu Ci for some poetry from this region, it’s pretty interesting).

   You got many of the characters right, although some of them are slightly different. If you are interested in the ancient forms and meanings of characters, I can recommend Outlier Dictionary on Pleco which is well researched. These are the explanations for the characters that differ from what you interpreted:

   力 was actually a picture of a plow

   男 someone who plows fields = man, male

   食 an upside-down mouth (亽) over a bamboo basket

   舞 a person holding ornaments like bird feathers or ox tails doing a rain dance (無). So you are right, just adding this to point out that the components on the bottom were originally feet.

   樂 an instrument made of silk (絲) over a wooden structure or platform (木)

   藥 borrowed the sound from 樂 and added 艹 (vegetation)

   會 two sound components with no special meaning

   示 an ancestral tablet

   土 a chunk of earth lying on the ground

   福, 畐 is a sound component

   家, 宀 roof/building plus 豕 which was originally written differently and was a sound component

   安 a woman kneeling quietly in a building, originally meaning to sit quietly, then the meaning was extended to mean peaceful or peace and quiet.
4. OutlierLinguistics December 6, 2022

   Let’s leave aside the fact that you can’t reconstruct Shang society just by looking at the characters (Shirakawa Shizuka had a similar idea and it led him to make some bizarre and horribly unsupported claims about characters).

   Another big issue here is that many of the forms you’ve listed aren’t Shang forms at all, but mid-to-late Western Zhou (樂、藥、酒、福), Spring & Autumn (食), and Warring States (社、會).

   Aside from that, there are quite a few issues with the explanations you’ve proposed:

   * 力 is not an arm, it’s a plow.
   * 男 isn’t using “strength” in a field, it’s a plow and a field (mens’ work)
   * 亼 is not a roof, it’s a mouth (upside-down form of 口), so 食 is a mouth over a bamboo basket of grain (not a cauldron). Note that 人 is *not* a sound component here as another poster suggested. Their sounds were basically nothing alike in Old Chinese.
   * 舞 is close—it’s a person holding oxtails or feathers and performing a rain dance (無 and 舞 were originally the same character; 舞 simply has the feet emphasized)
   * 樂 is strings 幺 stretched over a wooden 木 frame, with 白 added as a sound component
   * 藥 is just semantic component 艹 plus sound component 樂. You mention that you’re “not convinced” that 樂 doesn’t have meaning here. No paleographer I’m aware of thinks it’s a semantic component, and even the 2000-year-old Shuowen Jiezi says 樂 is just a sound component.
   * 會 was originally composed of 合 “to come together” and a sound component 𡆧. A decorative stroke was later added to 合, making the bottom look like 曰. The original meaning was “to meet, gather,” not “society/organization.”
   * 示 depicted an ancestral tablet, not an altar as was suggested by another poster. Also, no “manifesting” or spirits are involved. 😉
   * 畐 is just a sound component in 福
   * 家 was originally 宀 “building” plus 𢑓, a sound component. 𢑓 corrupted into 豕. It is definitely not “people in a house,” as 𢑓 doesn’t depict people, but a male boar.

   As for sound components that also express meaning, it’s widely accepted among paleographers that this mostly happens when the sound component was previously used to write the word in question (along with other words), and then a semantic component was later added to disambiguate which word was meant. Otherwise, sound components generally don’t have any semantic value. In other words, they usually weren’t choosing sound components for their meaning, but solely for their sound.
5. And_Why_ December 6, 2022

   I thought 家 was supposed to be pigs under a roof.
6. AlexWtvr December 6, 2022

   That’s a great summary! I like how you relate the depictions of character to society and practices of that time.

   There’s one thing though, 家 should be livestock under the roof (the shape of an animal is esp clear in the character on the right), which is still preserved today with 宀+豕 (pig).