An Analysis Of The Phenomenon Of Incorrectly Identifying Characters As Tongjia Characters In Texts From The Warring States Period Inscribed On Bamboo Slips And Silk Scrolls

The phenomenon of tongjia characters frequently occurs in recently excavated texts, and being able to master the meaning of tongjia characters is a critical aspect of understanding these texts. As of today, the academic world has done much in the way of researching tongjia characters, and yet there is still room for improvement. The subject of this thesis is tongjia characters appearing in text from the Warring States Period written on bamboo slips and silk scrolls. By examining pronunciation, character form, meaning, and how characters are used in the texts in which they appear, this paper analyzes the phenomenon of characters incorrectly identified as tongjia characters in published and draws conclusions from this analysis, arriving at four reasons for the incorrect identification of characters as tongjia characters.The main body of this thesis is divided into four chapters.The first chapter analyzes the phenomenon of incorrectly identifying certain characters as tongjia characters because they are un-apparent tongxing characters. The tongxing characters discussed in this chapter can be divided into two classes:tongxing characters that are not of the same type of character structure and tongxing characters that have arisen because of changes in character form. Because of an inadequate understanding of these two types of characters, a given character a is thought to be given character b, and this results in the incorrectly application of the term tongjia. Examples of these two character types are:“凷”and“谄”,"北"and“别”,“睾”and“羔”,“虐”and“号”,“息”and“塞”,“继”and“绝”,“写”and“侏”,etc. The second chapter explores the situation in which characters are identified as tongjia characters because of homophonous radicals. When investigated as a group, what have been labeled as tongjia characters with homophonous radicals originate in separate character forms, and in the process of the change and development of the characters, the radical of one of the characters gradually became similar to the other. Scholars in subsequent time periods where unaware of this situation, and therefore incorrectly believed these characters are homophonous tongjia characters, as in the examples of“怯”and“祛”,“视”and“见”,“母”and“侮”,“告”and“(?)(造)”,“岑”and“矜”,“吹”and“欠”,and“(?)”and“辛”The third chapter discusses the incorrect identification ofcharacters as tongjia characters because of the phenomenon of un-obvious synonymic replacement. Synonymic replacement refers to the phenomenon of two characters with the same meaning being used interchangeably in texts, with compendiums of tongjia characters identifying synonymous replacement as tongjia characters, as in the examples of“勿”and“无”,“常”and“�'”,“竽”and“投”,“凥”and’‘居”,and“丧”and“亡”．The fourth chapter discusses the incorrect identification of characters as tongjia characters arising from the situation in which a single character form has multiple pronunciations. The phenomenon of one character form with multiple pronunciations is the result of the use of one character to represent two different words with unrelated pronunciations in early Chinese characters. Scholars conflated single character forms with multiple pronunciations with tongjia characters, as in the examples of“立”and“位”and“沙”and“少”。The additional body of the thesis has two parts which separately discuss the reasons for contemporary scholars’misidentifying characters from texts written on bamboo slips and silk scrolls as tongjia characters and the influence of such misidentifications on research into ancient phonetics.