The Study On The Chinese Characters Use Of The Warring States Bamboo Slips Collected By Tsinghua University(X-XI)

The Warring States Bamboo Slips Collected by Tsinghua University has well preserved the true appearance of the usage of Chu style characters during the Warring States period.It is possible to clearly and accurately understand the rules of character use,and it shows the value in the history of the Chinese vocational learning through systematically studied on the separate character frequency,property of the usage of Chinese character,intercharacter relationship and their causes.According to statistics,there are 1338 separate characters without repeating in The Warring States Bamboo Slips Collected by Tsinghua University(X-XI),excluding incomplete characters,written differently,and repetitive text,with a total of 8177 characters.There are 85 characters high-frequency,accounting for 6.35% of the total number of characters,458 characters intermediate-frequency,accounting for 34.23% of the total number of characters,and 795 characters low-frequency,accounting for59.42% of the total number of characters.It is directly proportional to the function of word-formation of characters that the character frequency whether is high or low,and is inversely proportional to cumulative coverage that appears in The Tsinghua bamboo slips(X-XI).There are significant differences in the usage of characters in various character frequency regions,and the specific word content of each character frequency block has its own emphasis.The strokes of Chinese characters in low-frequency are relatively complex,and the distribution of character frequency is related to the nature of bamboo slips texts as Shangshu Literature and mathematical literature.As far as the properties of the usage of Chinese character are concerned,self-used characters play a dominant role in the bamboo slips,there are only 724 characters for self-use,accounting for 54.11% of the total number of the usage of Chinese character.And there are only 515 borrowed characters,accounting for 38.49%.Borrowing usage is flexible,and can be divided into three types: interchangability characters,false borrowing characters and combination of both.There are 99 dual-purpose characters which include three combination types: self-used and interchangability characters,self-used and false borrowing characters,self-used,interchangability characters and false borrowing characters,accounting for 7.40% of the total number of the usage of Chinese characters.The intercharacter relationship of bamboo slips texts is relatively complex,most of them are due to what phenomenon of variant characters and interchangability characters.Different writing characters are divided into two different types of writing different components and different strokes.On the one hand,different writing components can be subdivided into four categories: increasing meaningless components,accumulating the same components,different component position,and increasing or decreasing indirect components.On the other hand,different writing strokes can be divided into three categories: adding decorative strokes,increasing or decreasing strokes,changing poses.The heterogeneous characters can be divided into four types,which are caused by different character-forming methods,adding and subtracting meaningful components,increasing or decreasing phonological components,and selecting different components.According to statistics,there are 587 interchangability characters in bamboo slips texts.Among them,more interchangability characters with the connection of forms and structures than those without,and more interchangability characters associated with phonetic sign than those associated with forms and structures.This indicates that people tends to choose characters with the connection of forms and structures when selected interchangeable characters,and they mainly pay attention to the phonetic sign that indicate the function of sound,rather than the forms and structures.The phonological relationship between interchangability characters and the native characters is mainly characterized by the same rhyme parts,accounting for 82.46% of the total number of interchangability characters.In the quantitative correspondence relationship,the majority of the cases where an interchangability character corresponds to a native character,it is explained that most characters tend to be relatively single when borrowed.Objective factors such as fewer ancient Chinese characters,mixed use of breeding milk,and social environment,as well as subjective factors such as people pursued differentiation,the ancients still used the phonetic sign of characters and subjected to psychological effects of simplification.These factors have contributed to complexity of the intercharacter relationship in The Tsinghua bamboo slips(X-XI).This is an inevitable trend in the usage of characters to continuously adapt to social development and meet people’s daily needs,thereby recording an increasingly rich vocabulary of language.