The Origin And Early Development Of The Chinese Writing System

Description

A new scan of William Boltz's book on the origin of Chinese writing, with pages shown in landscape mode. From the introduction of the book: "In the present work, apart from the preliminary discussion in chapter 1, the possibility of a general theory of writing is only touched on in passing, and more by implication than by explicit statement. My purpose is instead to describe the nature and internal structure of the Chinese script from the time of its invention in the middle of the Shang age down to the period of its standardization in the Han, and to dispel some of the misconceptions that have long surrounded it. I have divided the discussion of this span of roughly a millennium and a half into two parts: (I) the origin and early development of the script in the Shang, which I have called the Shang Formation, and (II) the regularization and standardization of the script in the Ch‘in-Han period, which I call the Ch‘in-Han Reformation. With the discovery and availability in the last twenty years of a considerable body of pre-Han and early Han manuscripts we can see more clearly than heretofore the exact nature of the pre-Han, non-standardized, script, and assess more accurately the effects of the Han standardization. This in turn enables us to identify previously unknown features of the “reformation”." Title Contents Figures, Preface Preface Prolegomena Introduction Definition of writing Forerunners of Writing Shang formation, Pictographic origins Pictographic origins Logographs & zodiographs Graphic multivalence Determinatives Multivalence of graphs Egyptian - Multivalence of graphs Sumerian - Multivalence of graphs Paronomasia (Chinese) Polyphony (Chinese) Ch'in-Han reformation Early legend & classical tradition Wen & Tzu Liu shu & Shuo wen chieh tzu Impact of Chinese world-view Why Chinese script did not evolve into alphabet Glossary of technical terms - Abbreviated phonophoric Glossary of technical terms - Early Archaic Chinese Glossary of technical terms - Protom(ic) Abbreviations, Bibliography Bibliography Index of Chinese characters Index - Affixation Index - Chinese script Index - Liang chu culture Index - Sumero-Akkadian Corrigendum