Chang Yu-wei

Abstract

The characters  (piece 6342) and  (piece 6834) have been primarily interpreted as “Jie,” “Jian” or “Jie” in a majority of literature. After investigating the usage of  , this article explores its language composition, thereby establishing its verbal property. Starting from the strokes of “wood” at the upper left of the character , this article seeks to reconsider the connotation of “cutting wood with a dagger-axe” behind its coinage, and address the question as to why this word was used in describing warfare. By virtue of image construction, this article induces the connections between the character “Jian” and our ancestor’s thinking, thereby investigating its derivatives. Based on the character “Xian” interpreted as the detritus of logging, for example, Feng-Wu Zhou argued that the term “Xian people” refers to adherents of a former dynasty. By reference to the textual interpretation of the character “Jian,” Feng-Wu Zhou revealed that our ancestors invoked the metaphor of plants to represent the state. This article also performs a comparative analysis of parallel examples of the later times, contrasting the character “Jian” with the coinage of the character “Mie” and its derivatives.

Keywords:oracle bone, semantic analogy, Jian(翦), Nie(櫱), Mie(滅)