Chapter 11 Summary of the second section of Chinese characters - "Six Books"

The method of creating Chinese characters is gradually formed by people in the process of creating characters.Like the creation of characters itself, it is not an invention of a certain person, let alone someone who first worked out the method of creating characters and then created them. However, when the number of Chinese characters reached a certain level, some people began to summarize the method of making Chinese characters.So in the Warring States Period, the term "Six Books" appeared, which was found in a book about political rules and regulations at that time - "Zhou Li". "Six Books" is the induction and summary of the rules of Chinese character creation, and it is also a theory.Using this theory to teach elementary school students to recognize characters can get fast and good results.

However, the "Zhou Li" did not explain the title and content of the "Six Books".It was not until the Eastern Han Dynasty that someone introduced the "Six Books" in detail, but the explanations were quite different.There are two kinds of sayings that have a relatively large influence. One is what Ban Gu (32-92 A.D.) said in "Hanshu Yiwenzhi", which is called "pictograms, image things, onomatopoeia, Zhuanzhu, and borrowing"; Shen (58-148 A.D.?) said in "Shuowen Jiezi·Xu" that it is called "referring to things, pictographic, pictophonic, knowing, transcribing, and borrowing".

In the description in the previous section, we have actually given a preliminary introduction to the name and content of the "Six Books".We use Xu Shen's name, but the order is pictographic, referring to things, knowing, borrowing, and pictophonic, which is different from Xu Shen.This arrangement, on the one hand, is in line with the actual situation of the development of Chinese character creation, and at the same time, it is also easy to remember.Only "zhuanzhu", we didn't mention it, because "zhuanzhu" is generally considered to refer to the mutual interpretation between different Chinese characters with the same sound, similar meaning, and it is only a matter of word use, which has nothing to do with the direct method of making characters.

Under the guise of borrowing, it does not directly create characters, but only the borrowing of homonymous Chinese characters.However, as mentioned above, due to the use of borrowing method, it promoted the generation of pictophonetic characters, which later accounted for the vast majority of Chinese characters, and thus determined the nature of the Chinese character system. A book. Xu Shen gave a definition of "borrowing", which is called: "there is no original character, but rely on the sound to make things up." That is to say, when recording new words, there is no such word, and an existing word is used to express it according to the homonym. .This is in line with the characteristics of the borrowing method we mentioned above.However, there was another situation later, that is, due to the lack of standardized characters in ancient times, sometimes a certain word already had a certain Chinese character to represent it, but people did not use it, and used other homophones to represent it.For example, the word "Zao" in "morning and evening" had already appeared in the Warring States Period, but most people used the word "flea" in "flea" to replace it.In the famous biography of "Hongmen Banquet" ("Xiang Yu Benji") in "Historical Records", Sima Qian (145 BC - 90 BC) in the Western Han Dynasty wrote "You must come to thank King Xiang" (not tomorrow If you don't come to apologize to King Xiang earlier), the word "flea" in the sentence is a pretext for "early".This kind of false borrowing should belong to "the original has its own characters", the difference is that the pronunciation is the same, and it was later called "tongjia".Passing holidays is actually writing other characters.However, this phenomenon is quite common in the history of the use of Chinese characters. It can be said to be a habit of the ancients, so I will mention it here.

What we need to know about "Six Books" is that it not only expresses the method and rules of Chinese character creation; according to it, we can also analyze the structure of Chinese characters, so as to know the original meaning of Chinese characters, which is very important for us to learn and use. Chinese characters are of great help.However, the "Six Books" are summarized for the ancient writing stage of Chinese characters. With the evolution of Chinese character fonts and structures, it is difficult to use the "Six Books" to analyze the original meaning of the characters for the shape of many Chinese characters.For example, the pictographic character ⊙, which means "sun" in bronze script, becomes

"Six Books" is a summary of Chinese character creation and a guide for character creation. After the "Six Books" theory came into being, the reproduction of Chinese characters has not stopped.Many new characters produced in later generations basically use the "Six Books".But there is one phenomenon worth noting, that is, the newly created Chinese characters must meet the needs of the society and the needs of recording Chinese.Only when it meets the needs can it stand firm and be used; otherwise, even if government decrees and administrative power are used, it will not work.For example, during the Three Kingdoms period, Sun Xiu, Emperor Jingdi of the State of Wu, was keen to create new characters, and gave his four sons strange names and characters, all of which were new characters, such as the name of the prince (雨下单) (音湾), the character ( Lvxia Jiong) (sound until) and the like.In the Tang Dynasty, Wu Zetian ascended the throne with a woman, worried about the instability of the regime, so he accepted the suggestion of his ministers and created many new characters, such as changing "国" to "(口字内武)", which means the world of the Wu family; It was changed to "赵" (sound photo), which is also a newly coined word, which means to compare oneself to the sun, the moon and the sky.But whether it is Sun Xiu or Wu Zetian, although they used the imperial power to promulgate these new characters to the world, they have not been able to use them.In modern times, Lu Xun created a "猹" [cha tea] to record a small animal similar to a badger; Liu Bannong created a "she" as a third-person singular pronoun for women.Although they are only writers and do not have any administrative power, these two new characters meet the needs of recording Chinese, so they stand still and are included in dictionaries related to modern Chinese.These examples are thought-provoking.