A Sort Out And Research On The Qin Characters

Qin characters are particular important links in the history of Chinese characters for which they not only inherit Shangzhou characters inscribed on the bronze ware but also open the new way to the document characters. The seal characters of Shuo wen which based on the Qin characters have been proved to be a key period of the unified process of characters, and finally become the standard form of Chinese document characters. Besides, they play a prominent part in the philology and paleography, as the end of the ancient characters and the head of the later texts characters. But owing to the complexity of the Qin characters, currently there are few systematic research of them. Relevant work is urgent to be done to make a clear-up whole for the results. Meanwhile, many experts have appealed to build a Character encoding to serve for the philology, archaeology, paleography and other subjects. But, the encoding has doesn’t appeared till now.The Qin characters in this paper include the characters used by the people in Qin during the spring and autumn period and the Qin dynasty, such as bronze inscription, the stone, the bamboo slips, the jade, the pottery script, the currency and so on. In this paper, we aim at describing the arrangement and research of the Qin characters clearly on the basis of handling of the materials of the Qin characters. Finally to build a Character encoding of Qin characters including several of materials that can reflect the standard of current study in the academic fields. With the above principles, the paper is divided to two parts. Part one:research part; part two:index of Qin characters.The research part includes four sections. Introductions, this section mainly includes the summaries of the several of carriers of the Qin characters based on the unearthed materials, descriptions of Qin characters, explanations of Qin characters, distinguish between the carriers and the complication of the character encoding. The second chapter is about the explanatory of the Qin characters. This chapter reinterpret some puzzled characters through arrangeing many sorts of Qin characters. For example,(？),(Qin emperor vesse, Integrations4351). It was distinguished as "(?)" in the very long past period. Actually, it is the character“镇”.In all, we summarize2946Qin characters,25(合文),305(重文)and103characters are not distinguished. The third chapter compares Qin character, the seal character in Shuo wen and“籀文”,thus it comes to a conclusion that more than70%of the seal character in Shuo wen inherit the Qin characters in the shaped aspect with some differences which reflecting the fact that, the seal character in Shuo wen had standardized the Qin characters much more on the basis of inheriting them. Much reconstruction has attached to the tendency of the characters such as changing the upper and lower structure to the left and right structure. While comparing the structure of Qin characters to“籀文" in the work Shuo wen,we find that Qin characters don’t inherit directly from the“籀文”.There are about30characters same with the“籀文”among the97ones investigated which account for one third of the whole. And most of these characters comeing from the period of late West Zhou and spring and autumn period are little effected by the“籀文”,whose influence keep going down from spring and autumn period to Warring States Period. Through the comparisons of294Qin characters and ancient font in Shuo wen we find that there are20characters same with the ancient font while274of them are different. The results indicate that the part of the ancient font in Shuo wen comes from Qin characters, so the theory of heterotype of characters in Warring States Period is not exactly right. The fourth chapter pays attention to the investigation of the relationship between“桼”and“漆”and the origination of“皇”.The results come to be that "桼" in Shuo wen is the original form of“漆”which now used as漆樹.The character漆is the later form of“桼”usually used to express the name of river. The character皇is known as complying with自which may have two reasons:one is that people has confused“(?)”and“自”and another has been inflected by the“自 王会意”in Han dynasty other than inheriting the Qin characters.The Qin characters encoding is the main part of this paper. It is ranked in classification and chronicle order on the basis of arrangement of materials of Qin characters. This encoding contained3379characters,16599fonts.2421characters included in Shuo wen and525beyond it among the main body. Besides, there are25合文,305重文,and103ones unrecognized in the appendix. The character encoding first recruits the“镇”which will be of great value in the philology field.