The Comparative Research On Pictographs Of Oracle-bone Inscriptions And Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Oracle-bone Inscriptions and Egyptian Hieroglyphs both belong to the ancient self-generated writing systems, which have the feature of ideographs. Comparing these two kinds of systems can promote the study of each writing system, and it will have both thearetical and practical significance in investigating the characters'origination, composition and development. By doing this, we can also enrich the theories of comparative linguistics and general linguistics.Directed by the theories of comparative linguistics and general linguistics, we take the pictographs of Oracle-bone Inscriptions and Egyptian Hieroglyphs as our objects of comparative study. After long time collection and analysis of Egyptian Hieroglyphs, The author made two tables: Hieroglyphs ideograms and Hieroglyphs pictographs. This paper elaborates on the word-structure and usage of Hieroglyphs. It is the highlight of this paper.This thesis is divided into four chapters: Chapter one is the materials about Egyptian Hieroglyphs, introducing the characters'origination, development and the basic knowledge about the writing system itself.Chapter two is about the pictographs. Referring to the discourses of other scholars, the author made a re-definition about the concept of pictograph, according to which we choose out all the pictographs from the two writing systems and tab them at the end of the article.Chapter three is the materials and analyses about Egyptian Hieroglyphs ideograms. We summarized all of the ideograms in Egyptian Hieroglyphs and analyses them from different ways such as: the usage, the feminine sign, the stroke, and spelling methods, etc.Chapter four is the comparison of the pictographs from the two different systems, and it is also the main part of this thesis. We do the comparison from four aspects: First, the comparison of construction, single and combination. Second, the comparison of other usages, we try to find out the differences when the pictographs generate other kinds of ideographic characters. Third, the comparison of the characteristic appearance which including the style of xieshi and xieyi. When the pictograph shows some meaning through its appearance, it draws some image of a real object, and the objects can make difference. Finally, the comparison of the two different cultures'significance.Besides the comparison, this article tries to analyze the reasons of these differences from both the socialï¹ cultural and literal aspects. After the period of pictographs, Oracle-bone Inscriptions and Egyptian Hieroglyphs show different trends in development. The former inherited the ideographic motive of the pictographs, while the later one emerged the strong tendency of presenting phonetic sounds. As the early groups of self-generated writing systems, pictographs is the basis of generating new characters in the system, so there must be relations between the feature of pictographs and the developmental trend of the writing system. At the end of chapter three, we investigate these conceivable relations, and it will benefit a lot in comprehending the nature of one writing system from the primary stage of its development.