How did Xǔ Shèn 許慎 use wén 文 and zì 字?

Thursday 1 August 2024

I updated the graphical etymology entry on 字 (use guest/guest to login) and wrote an info text to clarify some of its technical meanings through history, in passing introducing the useful distinction between sinograms as graphs and as written words.

Bottéro writes:

There has never been any evidence to show that Xu Shen used either wén or zì as meaning “non-compound characters” or “compound characters” respectively. This innovative interpretation appeared centuries after Xu Shen’s life and became the official doctrine under the influence of Zheng Qiao 鄭椎 (1104–1162) of the Song dynasty. (Bottéro, 2002, p. 31)

If Xǔ Shèn didn’t use wén or zì in this way, how did he use them? From Bottéro’s article (Bottéro, 2002), it seems that in Xǔ Shèn’s usage, wén has a range of meanings. From “patterns”, “markings” to “graphs” to “(written) texts”. In distiction, zì often means something like: “characters as written words”.

In other words: while Xǔ Shèn uses both wén and zì to refer to characters (sinograms), in that usage wén refers specifically to characters as graphs, that is, their shape, while zì focusses on meaning: the word, or words, that a character refers to.

I think Qiú Xīguī 裘锡圭 makes the same distinction in his book Chinese Writing by using double quotes around a sinogram “xx” to denote “a graph vis-à-vis a word” and curly braces {xx} to denote “a word vis-à-vis a graph” (Qiú, 2000, p. xxi).

In the Graphical etymology sections I make this distinction by using the phrase “the graph [sinogram]” and “the word [sinogram]”.

References

Bottéro (2002) “Revisiting the wén 文 and the zì 字: The Great Chinese Character Hoax”, Françoise Bottéro, in Bulletin of the museum of Far Eastern antiquities 74, 2002. (pp. 14-33)

Qiú (2000) Chinese Writing 文字學概要, Qiu Xigui 裘锡圭 (Translated by Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman). The society for the study of early China & The institute of east asian studies, university of California, Berkeley. Birdtrack Press. New Haven, 2000.