The Comparative Research On Pictographs Of Oracle-bone Inscriptions And Maya Hieroglyphs

Oracle-bone Inscriptions and Maya Hieroglyphs all belong to the ancient self-generated writing systems, which have the feature of ideographs. Comparing these twe kinds of systems can promote the study of each writing system, and it will have both thearetical and practical significance in investigating the characters'origination, composition and development. By doing this, we can also enrich the theories of comparative linguistics and general linguistics.Directed by the theories of comparative linguistics and general linguistics, we take the pictographs of Oracle-bone Inscriptions and Maya Hieroglyphs as our object of comparative study. With quantized counting and detailed descripting these pictographs from two systems as the first step, we compare them from different angles such as the characteristic appearance, the image-taking and generating ability.This thesis is divided into three chapters: Chapter one is the materials about Maya Hieroglyphs, introducing the characters'origination, development and the basic knowledge about the writing sysem itself.Chapter two is about the pictographs. Refering to the discourses of other scholars, we make a re-definition about the concept of pictograph, according to which we choose out all the pictographs from the two writing systems and tab them at the end of the article.Chapter three is the comparison of the pictographs from the two different systems, and it is also the main part of this thesis. We do the comparison from three aspects: First, the comparison of the characteristic appearance, which including the style feature and the composition; Second, the comparison of image-taking. When the pictograph shows some meaning through its appearance, it draws some image of a real object, and the objects can make difference; Chapter three, the comparison of pictographs'generating ability. We try to find out the differences when the pictographs generate other kinds of ideographic characters(from pictographs to associative compounds, from pictographs to"xingshengzi") as the basis.Besides the comparison, the article tries to analyze the reasons of these differences from both the socialï¹ cultural and literal aspects. After the period of pictographs, Oracle-bone Inscriptions and Maya Hieroglyphs shows different trend in development. The former inherited the ideographic motive of the pictographs, while the later one emerged the strong tendency of presenting phonetic sounds. As the early groups of self-generated writing systems, pictographs is the basis of generating new characters in the system, so there must be ralations between the feature of pictographs and the developmental trend of the writing system. At the end of chapter three, we investigate these conceivable relations, and it will benefit a lot in comprehending the nature of one writing system from the primary stage of its development.