A study of the word families in the bronze inscriptions

With the development of human civilization, man has to express more complicated ideas and concepts. Language, words and characters have to develop to accommodate such development in human civilization. More and more characters were coined.; Chinese linguists have been trying to explain the development of Chinese characters and the possible relationships among the different characters. Since the Han Dynasty, various approaches have been explored. Some Chinese linguists tried to trace the development of Chinese characters and language through in-depth study of ancient Chinese classics. Others approached the issue from the viewpoint of Chinese phonetics. All these form the solid bases of Chinese etymology.; As bronze inscriptions are of an amount significant enough to be worth in-depth studies, they form an important area of study in the field of ancient linguistics. The present thesis attempts to focus on the word families in the bronze inscriptions in the Pre-Chin Period. The thesis is divided into the following sections: (1) To argue against the traditional concept of the origin of language and its relation with root morph. (2) A brief review of the main studies on Chinese etymology since the Han Dynasty. (3) To define the terms "word family" and "character family". (4) To discuss the basic factors of the formation of "word families" are transfer of the meanings of words and the generative and productive nature of Chinese characters. (5) To examine 108 characters in bronze inscriptions in depth. (6) Based on the above studies of the 108 characters, some ways that the word families formed are described.