Preliminary Discussion On The Li-Ding Of Small Seal In ShuoWen

"Li-Ding" is a regular work in studying characters of ancient Chinese and compiling literatures of data unearthed. But for us, some issues such as what is Li-Ding, how to do it, and what are the principles, are not very clear. A same word, in different principles and methods, often showed different images, which are very confusing.Small Seal words system has an important position in the entire history of the Chinese characters'development, which is a connected bridge for the new and the ancient Chinese characters. It has an irreplaceable reference value for us to study ancient text font structure and understand the meaning of the characters in ancient books correctly. Although Small Seal shape is very close to the existing script, but after the changing from Small Seal to Official Script, Small Seal had occurred in no small change in writing style and chevron. Furthermore, some have even changed the original structure of LiuShu, which will cause some difficulties in understanding its meaning and analyzing its chevron correctly. Therefore, it has very important and significance value to analyze and explore on the Li-Ding of Small Seal.Among many kinds of Small Seal written materials handed down, ShuoWen collected more than 9,000 Small Seal shape which is the only way to draw a large number on for studies. Now, there are many versions of the ShuoWen and the works which research on ShuoWen, which all add Script above the Small Seal, make it easy for readers to access and retrieval. For most Li-Ding form of the Small Seal, people's views are consistent. But there are still quite a number of disputed Li-Ding forms. Those words are the subject we have to discuss. The reason for the different forms is that everyone follows different principles and inconsistent methods. Moreover the "Li-Ding" theoretical research is still in its infancy, the definition, principles, methods, and other issues on"Li-Ding"are not very clear yet, there is no single point of view.This paper studied in Li-Ding of ShuoWen, which published by the publishing house of Zhonghua. In this study, we want to point out the deficiencies in it, discussing the principles and methods of Li-Ding, and use them to guide the practice. Namely, we pick up all the disputed words in ShuoWen's Volume I and Volume II. Then we used the two different methods to re-analysis them. At the same time, we also have analyzed the different forms of the words and explored their sources.