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pronunciation and meanings which included ‘melt, dissolve’ and ‘scrape, pare, cut’.
At a later stage, to reduce ambiguity in texts, determinatives were added. Consequently,
for ‘melt, dissolve’, / ‘water’ was added as a semantic marker or determinative,
giving (‘disappear’ is an extended sense from ‘melt, dissolve’), whereas
for ‘scrape’ / ‘knife’ was added, giving . Thus, while we find ‘resemble’ given
as the central meaning of in character dictionaries, its associated meaning in
and is ‘small, make small; scrape (and make small)’.
In most of the examples above, members of the same word-family share a common
graph element as phonetic. Note, though, that the graph element that serves as
phonetic within a particular word-family is not necessarily always the same; in fact,
often it is different, as the example below shows:
word-family: ‘round, surround’ (TA1965:619-20)
(‘fence, hedge’) original meaning: ‘encircling earthen wall’; the phonetic is .
original meaning: ‘hold and fondle precious stone in cupped hands’; the phonetic
is .
Conversely, one and the same graphic element can have different associated
senses (representing different word-families) in different graphs, as in the following
example:
(‘corner’) original meaning: ‘folds/creases in hills’ (here represents wordfamily
with core meaning ‘bend, complicated in detailed way’ [TA1965:307-11]).
(‘foolish’) original meaning: ‘mind is stiff/inflexible’ ( here represents a
word-family with core meaning ‘stiff ’ [TA1965:313-15]).
In addition to reconstruction of words in early Chinese by means of the methodology
of historical linguistics, reliance is also placed on information gleaned from
early dictionaries such as Shuowen jiezi (see Section 5 below). Often there is scope
for variation in interpretation of what can be gained from this method also, and so
scholars frequently differ in their analysis of a particular word or graph. To give just
one example: while Schuessler acknowledges may represent a member of a wordfamily
meaning ‘divide into equal sections’, he questions this as the basis for ‘village’ as
an extended meaning, on the grounds that prehistoric and early historic Chinese villages
‘probably were not systematically planned’ (AS2007:349). This kind of diversity
of interpretation is reflected in the individual entries in this book, many of which give
Introduction 15