A Study On Tongjia Words Of New Bronze Inscription In Recent Ten Years

Tongjia is a kind of temporary phenomenon of Character use relying on character pronunciation and borrowing fronts.Studying on the application condition of Tongjia with multi-period horizon not only helps people to have a more comprehensive understanding of Tongjia,but also investigates word use habits of our predecessors,which could provide a basis for the interpretation of literature.This paper analyzed 95 groups of Tongjia words verbatim using the double evidence methodology.These Tongjia words came from the newly published inscriptions on ancient bronzes which have been thoroughly cleaned up from 2007 to 2016.And on this basis considering the phonetic relation,structural relation and quantitative correspondence between Tongjia words and original words by the three periods of the Western Zhou Dynasty,the Spring and Autumn period,as well as the Warring States.Through investigation,it is found that the proportion of Tongjia characters in the total number of inscriptions was around 10.32%,8.86%and 2.82%respectively in the three periods,showing a general downward trend.It means that this temporary use of characters in inscriptions decreased gradually with the maturity of the Chinese character system and the increasingly standardized habits of using words.As far as the specific use characteristics to be concerned,in the matter of phonetics,the proportion of homonym was 28.57%in the Western Zhou Dynasty and it rose to 51.29%in the Spring and Autumn Period,which maybe is the reflection of the unbalanced development of phonetics in time and space,or the influence of phonetization of Chinese characters on communication.Moreover,the proportion of rhyming words remained at around 80%overall in every period,which showing that the ancients focus more on the rhyme factors in Tongjia characters.In terms of structure,except for the Warring States Period which have a serious "different writing form" phenomenon,the proportion of words with tangible connection between Tongjia and the original characters accounted for the vast majority(61.22%and 74.36%respectively).This shows that people tended to use pictographic characters to represent the non-pictographic characters which are mainly used to express shapes and meanings.When it comes to quantitative correspondence,the one-to-one relationship between the Tongjia words and the original characters occupied the great majority and all proportions exceeded 80%in the three stages,which further indicates that the interchangeability is an occasional and non-standard habit of using words.