April 25, 2024
Source: Guangming Daily
Author: Li Jing
Shandong Yantai paper-cutting artists create paper-cut works "Baifu Tu". Bright Pictures / Visual China
China Academy of Art
The structure of Chinese characters contains the wisdom and ingenuity of the Chinese nation, and the changes in the shape of Chinese characters often have deep meanings beyond the phonetic meaning of the characters. For example, the folk custom of seeking blessing is often realized through the change of the shape of the word "Fu": Kangxi Yubi "the first blessing in the world", the writing implies the word "longevity", the table "Fu Shou Shuangquan", the lower "Fu" is not sealed, and the meaning is "Hongfu boundless"; the word "Fu" on the door is pasted, which means "opening the door to welcome the blessing", and the word "Fu" on the rice cylinder is pasted upside down, and the "Fu" deformation is correct when the rice is poured, symbolizing "things go and blessing arrives"; 100 different "Fu" characters constitute "Baifu Tu", in order to seek "Baifu coming"...... This phenomenon of using Chinese characters to express their meanings by means of shape variation, orientation movement, stroke addition and deletion, sorting and combination, etc., is called the "super-semantic function" of Chinese characters by scholars, that is, Chinese characters can not correspond to the phonetic meaning of the symbols, but only rely on the form itself to play an expression function beyond language. This is an important feature that distinguishes Chinese characters from pinyin characters, and it is also a prominent embodiment of the uniqueness of Chinese character civilization and Chinese civilization.
Glyph ideogram Intuitive simulation
After the subordination of Chinese characters, the primitive pictographic and pictorial properties weakened, but the unique attribute of "according to the pictogram" in the origin stage has long been deeply engraved in the national cultural psychology and affected the cognitive psychology and usage habits of Chinese characters. People often trace shapes and things based on the similarity between the shape of the glyph and the shape of the thing, and activate the original pictographic function of the Chinese character. For example, "The Book of Songs: Boxi": "Its rain is its rain, and the sun rises from Gao." Among them, "Gao" indicates brightness, and the glyph of "day" on "wood" is used to describe the scene of hanging branches on the sun when the sun is sunny after the rain, which is lifelike. Another example, the Ming poem "Night to Xixi": "The cool moon rises and falls, and the peaks are uneven." The glyph "concave and convex" in the sentence should be combined with the semantics inside and outside, showing the staggered and undulating shape of the valley peaks and the "chaos" of the mountain peaks, as in the present.
If the above-mentioned characters such as "gao", "concave" and "convex" are both semantic and semantic, then the transcendence of Chinese characters over the function of language is more prominently manifested in the use of purely glyphs to associate objective things. For example, the poem "Jiangnan" of Han Yuefu: "Jiangnan can pick lotus, lotus leaves He Tiantian." The word "field" here does not record "farmland", but because the glyph is similar to a lotus leaf with lines, the word "field" is used to depict the lotus leaves that are luxuriantly connected. Another example, the Song poem "The frog turns white and wide, and the worm dies purple", in which the word "out" imitates the shape of the frog with four feet facing the sky after death, and the word "zhi" is like the shape of an earthworm coiled after death. "Out" and "of" are intended to be metaphors, and neither corresponds to the meaning of words. For another example, there is a bamboo forest courtyard in Yangzhou called "Geyuan", named after "one", and its character shape is like the appearance of bamboo leaves, which is interesting.
The supralinguistic function of Chinese characters can also be directly expressed in the form of "a certain glyph". For example, the Song poem "towers into the shoulders of the mountain", and the imagery is particularly smart. In the modern context, there are "one-word eyebrows", "eight-character steps", "national character face", "I-shaped building", "T-shaped intersection", "zigzag road", "Tianzi grid", "Sichuan character pattern", "tic-tac-toe brick", etc., all of which are special uses of whole characters as pictographic symbols to describe things.
The components are divided and combined with many meanings
As an integral part of Chinese characters, components can sometimes be used to "show meaning" in form, promoting the information related to words from "implicit" to "present". For example, "Shen (Shen) sacrifice" is a way to worship gods in ancient times. There is a record in "Zhou Li: Dazongbo" that "the sacrificial sacrifice to the mountains, forests and rivers with the raccoon dogs" refers to the sacrifice sinking into the water to worship the mountains and rivers. The word "Shen" only means "sinking into the water (to sacrifice)", and the object of sinking is unknown, while the word "Shen" in the oracle bone inscription has different glyphs from ox, sheep, jade, etc., and the components indicate different sacrifices. Similarly, there are words such as "prison", "herd" and "trap" in the oracle bone inscription, and the replacement components are cattle, sheep, deer, pigs, etc., and the objects involved are different if the components are different.
The components of Chinese characters (including non-functional parts) cannot be used independently in the linguistic chain, nor can they be used independently in the linguistic chain. If there is a situation where the component or component is independently expressed and used independently, it is a transcendence of the general semantic function. There are two main scenarios:
One is that the whole word does not express the meaning, and the component expresses the real meaning. For example, the scholar Feng Youlan once gave his friend Jin Yuelin Shoulian: "Why not stop at rice, but with tea." The word "rice" is composed of the three characters "eighty-eight", and the word "tea" is composed of two "ten" in the upper part and "eighty-eight" in the lower part, which add up to one hundred and eight. "Rice" does not refer to the word "rice", and "tea" has nothing to do with "tea", and the actual meaning of referring to the longevity of the elderly is hidden in the internal components of the word, which is quite elegant. According to legend, Ji Xiaolan inscribed "bamboo buds" for the newly built pavilion of Heshen's family, and Heshen thought that it was a classic from the "Book of Poetry: Sigan" in "such as bamboo buds, such as pine mao", very proud, but they did not know that it was intended to satirize his court "all straw bales", not to learn and not to know. "Bamboo bud" does not record the word "dense bamboo forest", but expresses the meaning of the split component, which reflects the excellent and abundant expressiveness of Chinese characters. There are similar usages in the modern online context, such as "嘦 (jiào) 怹 (tān), 嫑 (biáo) 忈 (rén)", which means "as long as he has a heart, not two hearts". "嘦" and "嫑" are originally dialect words, expressing "as long" and "don't", here the semantics are consistent with the dialect, but read separately; 忈 "ancient Tong" benevolence", here is interpreted as "two hearts". The real meaning of the speaker is on the component, even if he only knows the meaning of the word, but does not know the sound, he can read and use it.
The other is the real meaning of the whole word table, the component does not express the meaning, but the whole word is disassembled into the component word and directly compiled into the sentence. For example, the Book of Jin: "The End of the Ancient Moon Chaos Zhongzhou", in which "Ancient Moon" is a hidden word for "Hu", referring to the Hu people. The Song poem "Sit and look at the Eighteen Gong, pitch the ashes and remnants", and "Eighteen Gong" is analyzed from "pine", referring to the pine tree. The component only represents the original character that is being dismantled, and does not have the function of recording the language. In the process of dismantling and closing, the poems are full of purpose and euphemism.
This kind of glyph dismantling is also often used to create anagrams: either the author is separated and the reader is together, such as "words and deeds are taught, and every step is inseparable", "words, body, and inches" are combined to get the puzzle word "Xie"; Because there is another article to discuss it, I will not repeat it.
The shape variation is quite ingenious
The transcendence of Chinese characters in the function of language is also reflected in the transformation of the conventional form of the characters to convey special meanings. Chinese characters have strong plasticity, and the components and strokes can be recombined in the two-dimensional plane, which can be transformed into many different forms, which is particularly widely used in the network context. After the Chinese character components are split, they occupy multiple character positions, visually widening the width of the whole character horizontally, which can not only symbolize the widening of the body shape, such as "every festival 'moon and a half' three catties", but also metaphor the slowness in the time dimension, such as "experience the life of Chengdu's 'Xinman'". The increase or decrease of components can also show the super-linguistic charm of Chinese characters, such as netizens complaining: "Shandong enters autumn in a second, and 'Candong' becomes 'Shandong' overnight...... Soon it became 'mountain freeze' again. The "Candong", "Shandong" and "Shanjel" here are the shape variations on the basis of the "Shandong" glyph, "Can" increases "fire", "Shan" increases "water", and "freeze" increases "冫", and the change of the character corresponds to the unpredictable weather of "high temperature-heavy rain-low temperature" in the objective world.
In artistic design, the variation of the shape of Chinese characters has a unique aesthetic value and can also express special meanings. For example, the logo of the China Academy of Art resembles the word "country" without the left and right verticals, and the abstract word "beauty", implying that the beauty of the country is boundless. The logo design of the Anyang Museum is also full of wisdom: the two characters of "Anyang" are arranged vertically, the upper part of "An" is transformed into the shape of a mountain (the middle vertical is short), which resembles the eaves of ancient buildings, and the lower part of the word "female" is extended longitudinally, imitating the shape of the museum wall to cover the traditional character "Yang", implying that the rare treasures are collected and the yang energy of heaven and earth is accumulated. The words "country" and "an" convey a wealth of humanistic information through non-verbal means of body variation, with ingenuity and profound meaning. For another example, in the theme poster of anti-corruption and clean government, the form of Chinese characters conveys profound connotations through various changes: either "corruption" is inverted to express the meaning of "anti-corruption"; or "greed" is added to make "bei" become "prisoner", indicating that one stroke of greed will become a prisoner; or "corruption" and "corruption" are each combined into one word, which contains dialectical philosophy, and corruption is only separated by a line, so we must guard the bottom line and ring the alarm bell for a long time.
Word transformation has another pursuit
Chinese characters are often used in the process of using other words, which is related to folk culture and often implies deep meanings. For example, in the Liao Dynasty character book "Dragon Shrine Hand Mirror", because of the avoidance of Zhao Kuangyin's grandfather Zhao Jingzhi, the "mirror" was changed to "Jian"; when the book was engraved at the end of the Ming Dynasty, in order to avoid the name of Zhu Changluo of the Ming Dynasty, the homophonic words "taste" and "雒" were chosen to replace "Chang" and "Luo". The change of words reflects the cultural custom of "for the venerable, for the relatives, and for the sage" at that time.
In the New Year's greetings of the Lunar New Year, people often change a character in the idiom to a word with the same or similar sound as the Chinese zodiac character of the year, in order to please a good mouth, such as the "rabbit", the cause of the "dragon", the "sheep" eyebrows, the "chicken" auspicious, the "pig" good luck and so on. The use of words is sometimes for the pursuit of subtlety and elegance, such as the letter often writes "virtuous brother" as "virtuous di", in addition to the homonym of "di" and "brother", but also because "The Book of Songs, Xiaoya, Chang Di" is a poem that sings about brotherly love, and "Di" replaces "brother", which is more elegant. For example, the names of Beijing's hutongs have been changed in batches to avoid vulgarity, "sow" alley has been changed to "meizhu" alley, "sheeptail" alley has been changed to "Yangwei" alley, "Wang widow" diagonal street has been changed to "Wang Guangfu" diagonal street, etc.; in addition, Macao has changed the ancient name of "oyster mirror" to "Hao mirror", and Taiwan has changed the name of "chicken coop" to "Keelung". It is easy to be vulgar and elegant, reflecting the cultural orientation of the times and the ideology of the local people. However, place names are valuable intangible cultural heritage, carrying the settlement concept and cultural traditions of ancient people, if it is not for the sake of avoiding vulgarity and seeking elegance, it is best not to change the words of place names at will.
Chinese characters have a supralinguistic function, and the variation of glyphs and the substitution of words are often intended beyond words, and there is also a sense of consciousness, and this implied cultural meaning needs to be carefully understood.
(The author is an associate professor at the Research Center for the Inheritance, Dissemination and Education of Chinese Character Civilization of the State Language Commission, and the Henan Provincial Center for Ancient Writing and Chinese Civilization Inheritance and Innovation)
Editor in charge: Yang Na
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Review: Hao Lin