![]() third century BCE) in relation to construction of sacrificial altars. ![]() The earliest known description of the "Indian Circle" method for determination of the east-west line by use of the vertical gnomon appears within the Katyayana-sulbasutra (ca. Also crucial, and considered in conclusion, is that this direction allows us to explain for the first time a few mysterious reapplications of the form within early character coinages that are known not to have been licensed by phonological proximity. However, a more fundamental virtue is simple avoidance of violence against widely agreed paleographical and linguistic fact. (6) I do hold that this approach offers a refreshingly sharp account of early character structure. Neither is there any a priori reason to consider favorably the current proposal that this character instead reflects an "Indian Circle"-type geometric method for the determination of due east-a return to the old assumption that the relationship between and the word * was "first love" for both. Note that the problem is one of methodological rigor and not specifically with the idea that might at first have been a drawing of a tree or a bag or a bundle, suggestions regarding which the only proper a priori attitude is neutrality. (5) The takeaway is that the persistence-indeed, the increasing inviolability-of the linguistically unmoored ideas that first depicted a bundle or a bag is an embarrassment not for these ideas' originators but for the current generation of researchers, as we have thus far failed to leverage ever more sophisticated historical phonological tools toward a critical reevaluation of this and many other of our field's conventional wisdoms. I confine here to an ungainly footnote some consideration of the logic of these older analytical directions. (4) Apart from the fact that both ideas are based on already dubious formal claims, it has long been clear that neither *lhok 'bundle' nor *thak 'bag' will qualify as a "near-homophone" of * 'east', meaning that the idea of early rebus borrowing never so much as gets off the ground. As regards, sure enough, we are told simply that the character's OBI forms bear a resemblance to early renderings of ( and below), writing *lhok (> shu) 'bind bundle', or to two characters found in Western Zhou bronze inscriptions ( and below), which may be predecessors of a character and further relatable to, writing *thak (> tuo) 'bag bellows'. A pitfall here, however, is the tendency to latch onto a favored interpretation of graphic form and in so doing to lose sight of the more essential matter of words. Parallel processes are certainly well attested. Early inscriptions on bone and bronze from the late second to the early first millennium BCE show clearly that the resemblance of to glyphs writing the words ri 'sun' and mu 'tree wood' was the result of formal reanalysis of an earlier arrangement consisting of only four interlocking lines, two curved and two straight: (3)Īs claims for an original relationship with * 'east' thus seemed less likely, most twentieth-century investigators took a different approach: perhaps this character was devised not to write * 'east' but some (approximate) homophone, only later to be adopted to write 'east' on the basis of phonological closeness. (2) However, as is now widely recognized, these suggestions do not bear paleographical scrutiny. (1) A few modern proponents continue to see in the glyph the rising sun, a tree (sometimes the mythological "sun-tree" Fusang ), or the spring as the season of Wood (mu ) and the East within Han-era Five Phases correlative cosmologies. This interpretive direction is reflected as early as the Shuowen jiezi of around 100 CE, where we find the claim that the character depicts "the sun in a tree". ![]() ![]() Perhaps, then, this odd shape was crafted with precisely the word * 'east' in mind: In the case of the character shown just below, early inscriptions show it to write the Old Chinese (OC) word * 'east' (with neither character nor associated word much changed to the present). A natural first hypothesis when we discover Character X to represent Word Y in the earliest available materials, therefore, is that this observed relationship represents the original state of affairs. Chinese characters are used to write words, and as far as we know always have been. ![]()
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