Medieval Ways of Character Formation in Chinese Manuscript Culture

Traditional Chinese scholarship understood the principles of character formation according to the six scripts (liu shu 六書) model initially set forth in Eastern Han sources towards the end of the first century CE . Although initially these categories were not intended as etymological principles, in later times they were also used to explain the origin and early development of the script. Even some modern models of the origin of Chinese writing, which generally stem from the critique of traditional views, rely on the concept of liu shu as they try to determine the actual number of principles at play during the formative stages of the script. All of these models, however, seem to carry the assumption that writing had been created in the distant past and then creation essentially stopped. This paper is an attempt to demonstrate that character creation, that is, the development of orthographic structure, was an ongoing process that involved a number of principles beyond the traditional liu shu categories. Along the same line of thought, I am trying to draw attention to the value of interpreting character forms in terms of their medieval structure, rather than disregarding what we see in an effort to find out what an archaic structure might have been at the time the character first came into being.