Our earliest linguistic evidence in China is inscriptions on shell and bone made at the

great city Shang in the second millennium BC. They are written in characters that resemble
those in which CC was written, and many of them can be sensibly interpreted by reading
them as CC. The chance that that script was devised by the conquerors is also near zero. Writing
is as useless to migratory herdsmen as fancy horsemanship is to farmers. Did the rulers for
whom those divinations were recorded speak the language in which they were recorded?
And how was that related to the language spoken by the farmers? The makers of those
inscriptions, whom we misleadingly call the Shang dynasty, were conquered by another wave
of barbarians from the west, whom we misleadingly call the Chou dynasty, who also made
inscriptions, ones that seem to be in a different language from that of the shell and bone
inscriptions, though a closely related one. The Chou language looks to me more different from
CC than the Shang language. The view of those three as a simple historical procession
analogous to Latin→Vulgar Latin→Italian is one I can no longer accept. I reject the simplifying
assumption that CC is descended from the language of the Shih 詩 (Book of Odes, or Odes) in
the sense that my own English is descended from that of Chaucer. The textual history of the
Odes is a murky one and its poems are of heterogeneous origin, but they are quoted so often
in CC texts that we must allow for their influence on the CC vocabulary. Lacking proper
historical and linguistic analysis, early inscriptions can be of little use to help us read CC texts. I
include nothing in the Shu 書 (Shang Shu 尚書 Book of Documents) in the CC corpus.
We have indirect and direct evidence (see below, p. xxii) of regional variants of CC. The
language of the texts shows some but not much variation. It was a koiné, perhaps from Shang
language with admixture of other languages, probably learned as part of education in basic
literacy and spoken with local accents. As a reasonable guess the languages of North China
differed roughly as much as modern Romance languages. If so then spoken koiné could have
been acquired easily. We know hardly more about languages of the Yangtze valley than about
Hsiung-nu. The Li Sao 離騷 is in CC koiné with a Ch`u 楚 accent, not, I think, typical 楚 language. (vi-vii)
x Alphabets are efficient ways to record speech. The idea of an alphabet is the germ of
dozens of ways of writing a language, all learnable as systems in much less time than it
takes to learn the languages they write. Syllabaries are hardly less efficient if the number
of distinct syllables is not large. In Old Chinese it is. Over 3800 syllables are distinguished
in 廣韻, and Archaic Chinese had more. That would be a burden if each syllable had one
symbol, but in Chinese writing we find the inventory multiplied ten-fold. It is the worst
script in the world, save only one, and that one is derived from it. (I mean of course the
one Sir George Sansom called “surely without inferiors”,b the monumental junk-sculpture
of a script that the Japanese have made by remorseless bricolage of Chinese books.)
xii The Chinese speak as they do and spoke as they did for reasons found in their speech itself;
how they write, except when writing pastiche, derives from how they speak. The legend of
an “ideographic language” is false; reading Chinese is not grokking images of a man standing
by his words or a woman kneeling under a roof or a bear riding a skateboard through a
dentist’s office or whatever…
Achilles Fang praised Ezra Pound’s farcical translation of 惟義所在 as only that bird-hearted
equity make timber and lay hold of the earth, expressing reservation only about his “compromise
with popular etymology”.b Few sinologists go to that extreme; even those who translate 拜 as “put the hands together” do not render
曰 as “stick out the tongue” or 尾 as “sit on a feather.”But the legend was explicitly endorsed by Joseph Needham. Discussing
“pseudo-sciences”c he says, “Glyphomancy (chhe tzu) is a very curious game, which could only have arisen in a culture with an
ideographic language. It consisted in dissecting the written characters of personal and other names, with a view to making
prognostications from them.” d “Could only have” implies no counter-examples. But dissection of a word is common in English;
vide this analysis of expert: “An X is an unknown quantity and a spurt is a drip under pressure.” Written English words lend
themselves to “glyphomancy” also, as when therapist is analyzed as the rapist. A kind of puzzle clue works by such analysis, eg two
much-quoted ones by
Torquemada, panorama: “an orphan has neither,” and domain: “inciteful to matricide.”
xiii Graphs can acquire spurious readings. The graph 窌 p’Vg “pit” has a reading kvg through
confusion with another graph 窖 used to gloss it. The graph &, a variant of 瑳 ts’y, is now
read què through misconstruing, perhaps by the compilers of the Chinese telegraphic code,
of the notation 音闕 “No reading given,” in 康熙. The graph 虛~墟 qu# “rubble” is misread xu
by sinologists who confuse it with 虛 xu# “vacant”. A graph may write totally unrelated words.
As signific-phonetic 4 writes kAp “wink,” as dual-signific twcn “sleepy.”
xvi Classical Chinese authors did not write characters. They wrote language in the slithery
medium of phonetic syllable-graphs with significs. To read characters instead of language is
to distort what they wrote. There is no easy way to mastery of a language. Sinology has always
shied away from this hard truth, with the result that it is now little more than a sort of affinity
group–“The Friends of Chinese Characters”–masquerading as an academic discipline.
xvii Can we get any reliable linguistic data from these texts? Does rejecting Karlgren’s claims of
uniform rime in the Odes, backward regular development, and rigidly homorganic phonetic
series (see below, p. xxxviii) leave nothing on which to base the reconstruction of old Chinese?
If so, it would be better to acknowledge that than to pretend we can read text without
language. But rejecting these notions does not close every avenue to the language of these
texts. We are not the first to try to reconstruct something from scattered remains that were
distorted by fossilization… We have these kinds of good or fairly good evidence:
a. rimes. There are many thousands of them; we need not depend solely on the Odes.
b. puns. They are trickier to use than rimes, but they can give evidence about initials.
Bodman’s study of puns in late Han (see below, p. xx n) is an example.
c. phonetic elements of graphs. They can be hard to identify, as I show below (p. xxxv).
d. alternate graphs. They are informative if they use different phonetic elements.
e. Chinese writers’ reports of Chinese languages not their own. Noteworthy are Yang
Hsiung 揚雄 (below, p. xvi) and much later Yen Chih-t`ui 顏之推, but there are others.
f. comparands within Chinese. This vast body of data has been nearly ignored. Wang and
Downer broached it, as I mentioned above (p. xv n. b); Karlgren toyed with it.b Serruys’s
work on Han dialects used a “comparative method”c that compared real words to made-up
ones, giving, of course, made-up results.
xx The formula which most 釋名 glosses share is “A is B because something about B,”
where A sounds like B. An example of this form in English: “Dog is dig; it buries bones to dig
them up.” But sometimes that formula is modified (I suspect because the author lacked a
pun for his definiens, A, but had a good one for a synonym B), and we get “A is B because
something about B,” where B sounds like one of the other words in the “something” part.
English example: “Sweet is candy; nothing so dandy as candy.”
xxi Etymology is not meaning
With the minor exceptions of newly-coined technical terms and newly-introduced loan
words, no word ever has a limited sense that can be called “fundamental” or “original.” Words
are used in extended senses every day. An extension that is widely adopted becomes another
acceptation of the word. There is never a point in the history of any language at which it has
only a core vocabulary without variants or doublets or extended senses. Consider these
examples from English:
check (= “draft on a demand deposit”) Check that! (= “Let me correct my error.”)
Check! (= “That’s correct.”) checker (= “game piece”)
Check! (= “Guard your king.”) checker (= “tallyman”)
Check! (= “Bring the bill, please.”) Checkers (name of a dog)
The syllable check in all of the above examples derives from the same word, Persian
ša# h “king”. Would someone learning English be helped to master these idioms by knowing
that? Would a fluent speaker asked to Check out this book be enabled by this etymology to decide
whether the request is to examine the book or to withdraw it from a library?
xxx (bad Character dictionaries)Looking up characters is a miserable way to learn Chinese.
xxxi Graphs are inconsistent evidence
I say there is no system in Chinese writing. No principle of construction or use of Chinese
graphs pervades their history. The closest we can get to one is the use of a graph for a spoken
syllable, and there are sporadic exceptions to that, a graph writing more than one syllable and
a graph writing less than one. We don’t know if the first Chinese writing was pictographic or
logographic or syllabic, so we can’t tell what language it wrote. It may have been as different
from Chou language as Cantonese is from Mandarin. Using faux-Peking readings for oracle bone graphs obfuscates that question.
Theory-driven phonology blurs it even more.
xxxv Distinct graphs traceable to distinct early forms cannot be presumed to have always been
kept distinct. When the Ch`un-ch`iu era began, Chinese graphs had already been developing
for a thousand years. They wrote contrasting dialects in varied social environments, used by
people of differing rank who had learned the graphs by rote to uneven standards of accuracy.
They cannot have formed a simple standard system under those conditions. Confusion and conflation were already common. The
view of phonetic elements as discrete entities, subject to
rigid rules of usage, only changing with calligraphic fashion , when all change at once like a regiment of symbol-soldiers marching
through history, is too tidy to accommodate the evidence.
xxxix One and the same graph may write entirely unrelated words; one and the same word
may be written with entirely dissimilar graphs
xlii More interesting are comparands with initial l- and initial velars. There are pairs of words
that are synonyms and exact homophones except for the contrast of initial K- versus l-. Here
is a taste of the smorgasbord of comparands with K- and l- initials that can be assembled.
Word K- initial l- initial Word K- initial l- initial
“direct route” 徑 " “carve” 刻 勒
“neck” 頸 領 “arrive at” 詣 戾
“C. Asian” 胡 虜 “scrape” 擖 揧
“admirable” 傑 姴 “defective” 缺 劣
“shelter” 居 廬 “attach” 繫 麗
“understand” 曉 了 “ship” 航 *
“group” 群 倫 “forfend” 扞 攔
“bent bone” 觠 癵 “hit” 擊 攦
Only one of the words in this table, 攔, is written with a graph from a phonetic series for
which GSR gives Kl- clusters. Are we to bung clusters into the other series as well? There are
more such pairs, and there are even more in which the vowel quality is close but not an exact
match, such as these:
Word K- initial l- initial Word K- initial l- initial
“category” 彙 類
“trigger-catch” 機 6
“mus. note” 角 #
“all” 均 淪
“carry on shoulder” 肩 摙
“wail in grief” 吟 臨
“desire” 願 戀
“bind round” 緯 累
“plow” $%
“fruit” 果 耒
“bind” 緊 繗
“clear” 潔 洌
“flail” 枷 羅
“grasp” 挾 擸
If we don’t insist on an exact match for either the vowel or the meaning, allowing plausibly similar pairs such as 角 kUk “antlers”
and 鹿 luk “deer” or 疆 kIang “boundary” and 量 lIang “measure”, we could easily wind up pasting a g- onto every word in GSR
that now has a simple l- initial. We need to keep in mind that language change does not work through letters of the alphabet; it works
through movements of the speech organs and perception by the ears. Concurrence of both initial l- and initial velars in a phonetic
series is insufficient evidence on which to base a reconstruction of initial clusters.
lviii Both -m and -ng occur in the same series eg 893 (|). Archaic -m parallels Ancient /-ng in words like 風. Some word-pairs with
-m and -ng may be related, e.g. 朁 ts’cm|曾 dz’cng, 甚 DIcm|盛 DIEng, 參 SIcm|升 Sicng, 臨 lIcm|陵 licng, 黲 ts’ym|蒼 ts’yng. There
are alternate words for the same thing with contrasting -m and -ng as eg words for the bird Upupa epops. Its common name is 戴勝
tcgSIcng, but it is also called 戴鵀 tcgNIcm and 戴南 tcgncm. And there is the musical instrument 空侯 k’ungg’u also called 坎侯
k’cmg’u.
lix statistics got by assigning 切韻 tone to each of 4845 tokens in riming position in the Odes, ignoring the certainty of sound change
and dialect difference, show that rimes in the Odes have a closer resemblance to the tone system of 切韻 than what can be ascribed
to chance. This table shows how many of the total of 1650 sets of riming words contain a word in each pitchtone and how many of
those contain no word of any other tone:
tone sets unmixed sets
1 866 665
2 426 165
3 358 248
lxiii Don’t put uncritical trust in the exact wording of any text. There was a burning of books in Ch`in,a and the imperial library
burned at the end of that dynasty. Texts recovered later were redacted and consolidated to standards we would now consider
inappropriate. Some were reconstructed from memory. Some were blatantly faked, others more subtly so. Passages were interpolated
from fragments that may not have originated with that text; marginalia were incorporated into texts; strips were assembled out of
order. The imperial library was burned again at the end of the Han dynasty. After that, surviving texts were copied and recopied and
the standard of accuracy was variable, to put it politely. (Remember, even if we could have an author’s original copy, we could not
be guaranteed that it contained no errors.) Always look for more examples of anything you are interested in.
Shiji 4.147: 神龍之漦! Gt ~Pandora box tale. (see Cik p.227/[150]) 比三代莫敢發之至厲王之末發而觀之漦流于庭不可除厲王
使婦人裸而譟之漦化爲玄黿以入王後宮後宮之童妾旣齔而遭之旣笄而孕無夫而生子懼而棄之.
後:長安語曰城中好高髻四方高一尺城中好廣眉四方且半額城中好大袖四方全匹帛 Ch`angan had a saying, “If the city favors
high top-knots, in the provinces they go up a full foot. If the city favors broad eyebrows, in the provinces they go nearly halfway
round the forehead; if the city favors big sleeves, in the provinces they use a full bolt of silk.”
kIwcrD’IEn nc bogles in general 鬼神
If Bronislaw Malinowski’s observation that superstition is stronger among people in high-risk situations holds in general then we
should expect to find it strong in the imperial court and the royal courts that preceded it, all of which were seething cauldrons of
deadly intrigue, and we do. The difference between a 鬼 and a 神 (qqv) is worth considering on account of the important role
that attitudes toward these played in influencing behavior. First, there is a lexical difference: 鬼 writes only one word, a noun, while
神 writes two words, a noun and a homophonous stative verb. I suggest the verb as the older of the two words. The comparands I’ve
chosen contrast sharply. Words I compare to 神 have to do with fruiting, solidity, accuracy, timeliness and evidence. The verb
meant something like “able to make one feel the manifestation of an invisible power”. The noun then referred to that power as
manifested. Words I compare to 鬼 have to do with strangeness, weirdness, scariness, pollution or tabu. Examples of their use in CC
fit with that contrast, namely that a generic 神 is neutral vis-à-vis humans: neither ill nor well-intentioned, merely to be placated or
entreated as situations require. A 鬼 is typically a baleful thing, to be exorcised rather than dealt with as a rational sentience. Other
than that, the two nouns have much in common. Either can refer to the spirit of a dead person, or to something supernatural that
never was human. There is thus some interchange between them, and one may encounter a tale of a benevolent 鬼 or a malevolent
神. The question arises of where these bogles hide when they are not manifest, which is most of the time. The verb used to label the
manifestation of a 神 is typically 降, suggesting a place overhead (v. 天). The verb for the appearance of a 鬼 is typically
現, seeming to suggest that it was there all along, just invisible. Can we then say that one difference is that 神 rise and sink like
lemon pips in ginger ale while 鬼 remain earthbound? Or are there earthbound 神 also? The 神 of the dead are said to be present
at the sacrificial meal in their honor; they are also said to be present in the 主 “spirit-tablets” placed in their names in the
ancestral temple, but whether they are always present there or only come when summoned by being addressed by an officiant is not
clear.
It is easy to muddle our understanding of these concepts on their own terms with notions from European religions. The idea that a
human soul goes to heaven as a reward for a good life has nothing to do with ancient Chinese ideas of 神 and 天. Sky’s payback for
good and evil always occurs before death, and may take the form of death itself. The idea of hell is not mentioned until introduced
as part of Buddhism. And 神 does not correspond to soul as a zero-mass organ of the human corpus. We also have 氣 “energy”, 精
“essence”, 魄 “animator” and 魂 “mind-stuff” (qqv). None of these has the independent moral agency ascribed to the human
soul.
All these terms were used in advocating and criticising policy decisions. In reading about them we can discern several attitudes to
鬼 and 神. One is simple incredulity. Another is to grant that there may be something to them but to refuse to get involved. A third is
pietism, the exploitation of abstract supernatural doctrines for cynical concrete ends. Another is what simply must be termed
religious belief. The structure of this belief and the pietism that exploits it can be hard to see as anything more than a random lot of
detailed superstitions, but an effort should be made. Taking shortcuts by tacitly introducing western concepts like God, heaven or
soul leads you away from, not toward, understanding what CC texts have to tell us. Words like holy, prayer, worship, reverence and
sanctity, all hard to define even in the context of a familiar religion, should be avoided in translation, or used only with strenuous
efforts at objective precision. 左:鬼神非人實親 Humans are not things to which spirits form close attachments.
180-1 其
pp159-62 爲 def! (total pp.#)
淮:君子不入獄爲其傷恩也不入市爲其侳廉也
積不可不愼者也 Gentlemen don’t enter law courts because it diminishes compassion, nor markets because it impugns integrity.
Habitual practices are things of which one must be very cautious.
Cik255: 莊:體盡無窮而遊無朕 Entirely exhaust the infinite and roam without bound.
淮:凡物有朕唯道無朕 All things have limits; only the Way has no limits.
淮:進退詘伸不見朕戝 It goes forward and backward, bends and straightens, without seeing any barrier. [nr]
淮:藏無形行無迹遊無朕 Dormant, he is formless; he acts without trace, he roams without bounds.
呂:人主自智而愚人自巧而拙人
237(165) 草: 心有疏密手有巧拙.x
250: 晏:靈山固以石爲身以草木爲髮.
HN:走不以手.
莊:景不爲曲物直響不爲惡聲美
抱:削瓦石爲芒鍼 whittle pottery or stone into sharp needles [example of futility]
國:我君是事非事土也
左:民不見德而唯戮是聞
左:鬼神非其族類不歆其祀 Spirits not of the same clan and lineage do not savor the sacrifice.
左:可薦於鬼神可羞於王公 They can be offered to the spirits or presented to kings and dukes.
墨:鬼神孰與聖人明智 Which is more intelligent, spirits or human sages?
管:思之思之不得鬼神教之非鬼神之力也
其精氣之極也一氣能變曰精 Ponder it, ponder it and not get it. The spirits teach it to you. It’s not due to the power of the spirits but
to the utter-goingness of the quinbus. Unified vapor if it can make unpredictable things happen is called “pure.”
衡:人飲食無日鬼神何故有日 There are no set days on which people eat and drink; why should spirits have such set days?
墨:吾言何遽不善而鬼神何遽不明 How does it follow that what I say is not good or that the spirits have no consciousness?
論:敬鬼神而遠之 Respect spirits but steer clear of them
管:上恃龜[筮→]筴好用巫毉則鬼神驟祟 If the superiors rely on the tortoise and milfoil and are fond of employing shamans and
witch doctors then the spirits will dump a load of weird stuff on them.
晉:善誦神咒能役使鬼神 He was skilful at intoning incantations and could make eldritch beings do his bidding.
衡:鬼神用巫之口告人 Spirits use the mouth of the medium to warn people.
淮:枕戶橉而臥者鬼神蹠其首 If you sleep pillowed on the threshold demons will step on your head.
左:天禍許國鬼神實不逞于許君 If Sky has sent ill fortune to the state of Hsü, it is the spirits that are dissatisfied with the ruler of
Hsü.
禮:夫禮之初始諸飲食其燔黍捭豚汙尊而抔飲蕢桴而土鼓猶若可以致其敬於鬼神 Now when ritual first began, they started it in
drinking and eating. When they parched millet and cooked pork at an open fire, tilted the jug and drank from cupped hands and
flourished their drumsticks while beating drums, they were yet able to express their respect to the spirits.
衡:使聖人達視遠見洞聽潛聞與天地談與鬼神言知天上地下之事乃可謂神而先知道與人卓異岑心 Suppose sages had x-ray
vision and could see far away, had super hearing and could hear through obstacles, conversed with sky and earth, talked with spirits,
knew what went on above the sky and below the earth, then and only then could we say that they had divine foreknowledge and
were of an order surpassing mere mortals.
衡:使地三年乃成一葉則萬物之有葉者寡矣.
戰:有一人過曰善射可教射也矣.
草:凡人各殊氣血異筋骨心有疏密手有巧拙x
非:酸甘鹹淡不以口斷而決與[于]宰尹.
k’Icd 3.8 vapor, mass-energy 68 氣 暣 炁 气
The stuff by which things move. It is invisible (except when we see it), intangible (except when we feel it), inchoate (except when it
coalesces). All living things contain it; some also breathe it in and out. There are distinct sorts of it according with the Yin, Yang
and five elements, but it’s all the same stuff. Altogether a much less satisfactory concept than phlogiston, which at least turned out to
be scientifically refutable; but by the same token, much handier for off-the-cuff explanations of how things work. I like Creel’s
suggestion that the concept may have originated in the observation that the lid of a boiling pot is moved by the escaping water
vapor. It may be more than coincidence that the word is a near-homonym of k’ICd 器 “vessel.” In philosophy 氣, even more so
than 德, is a concept hard to explain in terms of 呂:命也者不知所以然而然者也
western cosmology; the world-view it presupposes cannot be made to fit with western models dating from Aristotle and earlier. The
western view sees matter and motion and suggests some relation between them. The modern concept of energy dates from the
enlightenment, but related concepts like “quantity of motion” are found earlier. Both concepts, matter and energy, are subsumed by
氣, but not in a way that makes it possible to draw any equivalence. The western model not
only allows but requires quantitative measurement of mass and energy. The Chinese model allows measurement of weight, which
can stand in as a substitute for mass. It allows measurement of length and time, whose ratio is speed. Thus components of
a formula for quantifying energy are present; what is lacking is the very concept of quantifiable energy. Once upon a time, at the
beginning of the universe, 氣 was all identical. It was called the big blob 太一. For no reason at all, or at least none I have ever
seen mentioned, it separated into distinct lumps; as separation proceeded these lumps turned out to be the distinct physical objects
we see around us now. The word for these is 物. We think of 物 as lumps of matter which move by exchanging energy among
themselves, both matter and energy being quantitatively measurable. In the Chinese model, they are lumps of 氣, which move
because 氣 moves. No technical terms for mass or energy exist, as none are needed in this model. (This is why I consider “five
phases” to be as much a mistranslation of 五行 as “five elements”. Things like 木 and 土 are not matter, nor are they energy; they
are 氣, and as such they move 行 according to their own natures.) In common parlance when mass or energy is an important
feature of a description, “weight” 重 and “substance” 質 and “volume” 容 or 實 can all refer to mass. Potential energy is ascribed
to the relative position 勢 of things, while kinetic energy is not distinguished from speed 速, which is in turn only vaguely
distinguished from acceleration 疾 or 激. To translate 氣, I sometimes use vapor, sometimes energy, sometimes gas and sometimes
air. I have found other ad hoc renderings needed as well. But to grasp the concept we must bear in mind that 氣 is the basic stuff of
the universe. There are a small number of pure types of it, lumps of which interact by resonance just as do the strings of musical
instruments. Oil and horses and clouds and all things are composed of blends of these few types, differing proportions accounting
for their differing behavior–but we cannot measure such proportions; we can only infer them from the things’ behavior.
衡:氣若雲霧 Energy-vapor is like clouds and mist.
釋:氣餼也餼然有聲而無形也 k’Icd “energyvapor”
is xIcd “breath”; breathlike it has sound but no shape.
衡:五藏氣之主也 The five viscera are the host- media of the vapor energy
衡:一人之身含五行之氣 Within one human body are contained the vapors of the five elements.
莊:陰陽之氣有沴其心閒而無事 Yin and yang energy vitiated each other in his heart but he did not trouble himself about it.
衡:人生性命富貴者初稟自然之氣 When people are conceived, those who are destined to become rich and high-ranking initially
are provided with the stuff that makes it so all by itself.
淮:鴈順風以愛氣力 Wild geese fly downwind so as to conserve energy.
淮:日月不應非其氣君子不容非其類也 The sun and moon do not respond to what is alien to their energy;
a courtier does not accommodate what is alien to his kind.
衡:諸生息之物氣絕則死 All things that live and breathe die if their air is cut off.
衡:或以人物或以禎祥或以光氣 Some [manifest it] in their corporeal persons, some by auspicious omens, some by glowing auras.
衡:使生人不飲食而徒以口歆肴食之氣不過三日則餓死矣 Suppose a living person were to leave off eating and drinking and only
use his mouth to savor the steam of the sacrificial meals, he would have starved to death in no more than three days.
釋:筯力也肉中之力氣之元也. “Muscle” is “strength”; the source of power within the flesh.
衡:敵力角氣 let the strength be matched and the fighting spirit equal
呂:意氣易動蹻然不固 Their attention is easily distracted; they are willful and unstable.
晏:古之飲酒也足以通氣合好而已矣 When they drank wine in the old days, it was only enough to get the juices flowing and
everyone feeling friendly.
莊:游心於淡合氣於漠順物自然而無容私焉 Let the mind wander in tranquility, harmonize the spirit with silence, follow nature’s
own way of being and allow nothing individual in it.
衡:火困而氣熱 If fire is constricted, the flame gets hotter.
衡:夫雷之發動一氣一聲也 When thunderbolts erupt there is one pulse of energy and one clap of sound.
官:以椒塗室取溫煖除惡氣也 She had her chambers plastered with thyme, to get warmth and get rid of bad smells.
史:無夫而生子懼而棄之.
左:婦養姑者也虧姑以成婦逆莫大焉x
墨:夫好美者豈曰吾族人莫之好故不好哉?!
後:獻樂及幻人能變化吐火自支解易牛馬頭
衡:無所師友有[又]不學書.
三:平生長戎旅手不能書其所識不過十字而口授作書皆有意理使人讀史漢諸紀傳聽之備知其大義往往論說不失其指 P`ing
was born and raised among military expeditions. He could not write, and could recognize no more than about ten graphs He would
write by oral dictation and always conveyed his intent with clear logic. He had someone read the royal [紀] and non-royal [傳]
biographies in Shih Chi and Han Shu to him, and he got the general significance of everything he heard. He would often discuss
them without misunderstanding. [Illiterate 王平 may have been but he must have been intelligent, if his strategic and political
success is a guide. The style of 史紀 strikes me as approximating the conversation of an intelligent and well-informed man. But
works like 漢書 are self-consciously literary works, not so much for esoteric vocabulary as for mannered diction and compressed
expression. That 王平 can be plausibly claimed to have largely understood it when read aloud is evidence about the role of such
mannered diction in spoken political discourse, which in turn bears on the question of how close CC was to some spoken
Chinese language. V. notes under 說
呂:是正坐於夕室也其所謂正乃不正矣
戰:此所謂市怨而買禍者也
非:短之臨高也以位不肖之制賢也以勢
草:余懼其背經而趨俗
淮:寧一引重無久持輕寧一月饑無一旬餓x
衡:何子居之高視之下儀貌之壯語言之野也
顏:也是語已及助句之辭文籍備有之矣
左:汝忘君之爲孺子牛而折其齒乎
人: [Two human temperaments]猶火日外照不能內見金水內映不能外光
孟:由射於百步之外也其至爾力也其中非爾力也
淮:夫胡人見黂不知其可以爲布也越人見毳不知其可以爲旃也故不通於物者難與言化 Consider how a Hu barbarian seeing a
hemp seed could have no idea that it could be made into cloth, or how a Yüeh barbarian seeing fine hair could never guess that it
might make felt. Thus it is difficult to discuss changes with those who are unfamiliar with things.
淮:精神通於死生則物孰能惑之 If one’s spirit connects directly to life and death then what thing could mislead it?
非:非義也不可以雪恥使之而義也 (end v means)
呂:子肉也我肉也尚胡革求肉而爲於是具
染而已因抽刀而相啖至死而止 “You’re meat. I’m meat. What’s the point of looking for any other meat? Just add sauce to this,
that’s all.” So they drew their knives and devoured each other until they died.
衡:推此以論 to reason by extending this [analogy]
人:推此論之 to reason by extending this [analogy]
衡:推人道以論之虛妄之言也 If we reason by analogy from the ways of humans, this is an idle, frivolous tale.
草:推斯言之豈不細哉 When we discuss it in these terms, isn’t it pathetic?
國:佞之見佞,果喪其田;詐之見詐,果喪其賂.
呂:舟車之始見也三世然後安之.
左:民三其力二入於君而衣食其一.
禮:是故道而不徑舟而不游不敢以先父母之遺體行殆
史:魏文侯時西門豹爲鄴令豹往到鄴會長老問之民所疾苦長老曰苦爲河伯娶婦以故貧豹問其故對曰鄴三老廷掾常歲賦斂百姓
收取其錢得數百萬用其二三十萬爲河伯娶婦與祝巫共分其餘錢持歸 (good tale)
HN 16:小人之譽人,反為損.東家母死,其子哭之不哀.西家子見之,歸謂其母曰 “社何愛速死,吾必悲哭社”夫欲其母之死者,雖
死亦不能悲哭矣.
管:此其必亡也猶自萬仞之山播而入深淵其死而不振也必.
呂:殺其民以自活.
呂:始生人者天也人無事焉 What first engenders people is sky; people have nothing to do with it.
衡:人生於人非生於土也
楚:萬民之生各有所錯.(place 2 fit in)
淮:能反其所生若未有形謂之眞人.
呂:始生之者天也養成之者人也.
國:危事不可以爲安死事不可以爲生則無爲貴智矣.
非:使人樂生於爲是愛身於爲非.
235 墨:天必欲人之相爱相利.
晏:上山見虎虎之室也下澤見蛇蛇之穴也

淮:也之與矣相去千里.
非:人主釋法用私則上下不別矣.
衡:五穀自生不須人爲之.
淮:畜粟者欲歲之荒饑也.
淮:據地而吐之盡寫其食.
史:冠雖敝必加於首履雖新必關於足.
荀:君子恥不修不恥見汙恥不信不恥不見信恥不能不恥不見用
漢:磨礱底厲不見其損有時而盡.
國:曰非故也公曰君作故 “It’s not according to precedent.” The marquess replied, “Rulers make precedents.”
史:欲左左欲右右不用命乃入吾網.
考:或坐而論道或作而行之.
呂:愈侈其葬則心非爲乎死者慮也.
非:先王之所以使其臣民者非爵祿則刑罰也.
荀:然則能不能之與可不可其不同遠矣其不可以相爲明矣
戰:利則行之害則舍之疑則少嘗之.
As with sets of comparands, inclusiveness seems the most useful organizing principle at this stage, so primary, secondary and
tertiary phonetics are all lumped into one series. For example, 口 is phonetic in 古, 句 and 去; but 古, not 口, is phonetic in 居, while
居, not 古, is phonetic in 踞. All graphs in GSR series 49 古, 108 句 and 642 去 have been transferred into series 110, and
those three series are thus missing from this table. A cross-reference is provided where the missing series would be. For the same
reason, series 131 取, 632 耴, 638 聶, 688 咠 and 1178 叢 will not be found in this table, their graphs having been transferred to
series 981 耳, which is their primary phonetic element. Where I have conflated elements whose modern forms seem unrelated,
typically earlier forms will be found to bear a closer resemblance. A more exact inventory must await the scientific investigation of
the history of Chinese orthography which has yet to be done.
The typical reader will encounter these graphs almost solely in their modern forms. I have not chosen any particular modern element
to stand as the phonetic in a series, nor have I assigned a modal phonetic value, so as to avoid pre-judging the results of historical
investigation. I show the range of modern graphs that I consider to share a phonetic element and the range of readings they may be
given. Reference works such as 甲骨文編, 金文編 and 金石大字典 can supply early forms of many of these graphs, but we have
little reliable information about when and where most of them were devised nor how long they remained in use, nor which forms
influenced the development of which others.
Philological inquiry has cast doubt on the theory that in all syllables written with a given phonetic element, Archaic Chinese finals
must be homorganic with finals that survived into Ancient Chinese. What we have is not a fixed inventory of phonetic symbols that
evolve uniformly over centuries, but a loose and variable congeries of symbols that are interpreted anew by each individual who
learns to read and write, mostly according to received tradition, partly by local option and partly just ad hoc. The phonetic values of
an element are relative to an era in the history of a dialect of Chinese. An element which might seem phonetically appropriate to
write a certain word might find no chance of being adopted for an evolved descendant of that word at a later era unless it was
already sanctioned by traditional use. Thus the role of phonetic elements in reconstructing the pronunciation of old forms of Chinese
turns out to be less simple than had been hoped. The careless interchange by copyists of phonetics such as 勺勻包句旬 can
be sorted out, with caution and patience, because of the wide difference in the sound of the different words these might represent,
but with phonetics whose Ancient Chinese reflexes differ less obviously, such as 奴 and 如 or 焦~集 and 焦~雀, we may face an
inextricable tangle. Nonetheless, few skills so facilitate the reading of old Chinese texts as a wide command of phonetic elements.
There may be as many as two thousand of them, and they play a far more important role than signific elements in conveying text to
the reader. One who has not learned them well has not learned to read well.
國:擇福莫若重擇禍莫若輕
墨:夫好美者豈曰吾族人莫之好故不好哉
非:刻削之道鼻莫如大目莫如小
淮:山生金反自刻木生蠹反自食人生事反自賊
左:其取之公也薄其施之民也厚
國:莫能勿從.

呂:命也者不知所以然而然者也
呂:身者所爲也天下者所以爲也
管:目之所以視非特山陵之見也
呂:六欲莫得其宜也
漢:古之所予祿者不食於力不動於末
呂:是其所非非其所是惑莫大焉
左:上所不爲而民或爲之
衡:親者人所力報也
呂:凡聖人之動作也必察其所以之與其所以爲
呂:是正坐於夕室也其所謂正乃不正矣
國:非吾所能爲也
商:無所於食則必農
列:日之所入
呂:楚人生乎楚長乎而楚言不知其所受之
呂:令者...賢不肖安危之所定也
國:福無所用輕禍無所用重

漢:與我無禮
非:侏儒俳優固人主之所與也
非:不在所與居在所與謀也
淮:夫井魚不可與語大拘於隘也
淮:不通於物者難與言化
史:群臣相與誦皇帝功德刻于金石以爲表經
選:長城地勢嶮萬里與雲平

王吉, HS 72.3063:是以百里不同風,千里不同俗;戶異政,人殊服.
SJ 6.297: 吾聞先即制人,後則為人所制
SJ6.300:求楚懷王孫 [羋]心民閒為人牧羊立以為楚懷王,從民所望也