What is the Etymology of these 2 characters 王 and 主 ?

[Sreeni]

What is the Etymology of these 2 characters 王 and 主 ? How these characters are created?

[Jim]

This says that the oracle bone form of wang resembled a fuyue executioner's axe and so the highest form of power, i.e. of life and death: https://baike.baidu.com/item/王/504?fr=aladdin

 

The same dictionary says that the oracle bone form of zhu resembled a candle flame and so came to mean fundamental and prominent then by extension a lord or a master who owned slaves. https://baike.baidu.com/item/主/2361193

 

We have several proper etymologists post here who might have a better explanation.

[OneEye]

That explanation for 王 is correct. It was an axe blade, a symbol of power.

 

The explanation for 主 (a candle) is an old one, which comes from the Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字. Unfortunately it's not correct. 主 was originally a depiction of a memorial tablet used for sacrifices to the dead. That meaning (memorial tablet for sacrifices) was extended to mean "god of a locale", then further extended to "leader", "ruler", then "prominent", etc.

 

The two characters are entirely unrelated, despite their surface-level resemblance in the modern script.

 

I try not to plug our stuff too hard here, but you can look up character etymologies like this in our dictionary for Pleco.

[anonymoose]

8 hours ago, OneEye said:

The explanation for 主 (a candle) is an old one, which comes from the Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字. Unfortunately it's not correct. 主 was originally a depiction of a memorial tablet used for sacrifices to the dead. That meaning (memorial tablet for sacrifices) was extended to mean "god of a locale", then further extended to "leader", "ruler", then "prominent", etc.

 

How did you research this to come to the conclusion that 說文解字 is incorrect?

[Sreeni]

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/主 I have come across through this and referring the Glyph origin, Bronze inscription. It seems that a person with big head. Might be Master or owner.  My intention is to instantly remember this image to remember vocabulary with no ambiguity.

 

Thanks Jim for the links, but could not understand Chinese completely, but partly, as I am beginner

 

oneEye thanks for detailed explanation from oracle bone it seems the memorial tablet. Thanks for your point of view and explanation, it helped 

 

anonymoose I think it is based on history and guess. Proving it might be difficult and may be possible. But can you understand unprove oneEye point of view memory tablet...

[OneEye]

22 minutes ago, anonymoose said:

How did you research this to come to the conclusion that 說文解字 is incorrect?

 

Note that this isn't just our conclusion. This is the general consensus of paleographers, and was proposed decades ago by 唐蘭 (d. 1979) and 陳夢家 (d. 1966), two prominent experts on bronze and oracle bone script, respectively.

 

Also, keep in mind that it isn't unusual for the Shuowen to be in error. In fact, it's quite common. Xu Shen (the author) didn't have access to nearly as much data as we have today (zero knowledge of oracle bone script, for example) and was constrained by pre-scientific thinking. His analyses of characters and even the structure of the Shuowen itself were heavily influenced by the 陰陽五行 system of cosmology popular at the time, for example. As such, it's best to think of the Shuowen as "one Han Dynasty scholar's (highly influential) analysis of characters," and not as an authoritative source of character etymology.

 

A prominent paleographer, 劉釗, says this in his book 《古文字構形學》: 「從今天對古文字的掌握程度看，毫無誇張地說，凡是古文字中有的而《說文》對其形體進行過解說的字，80-90%是有問題的。」 Roughly, "Of the characters explained in the Shuowen for which we have paleographic evidence, it's not an exaggeration to say that 80-90% of the Shuowen's explanations are problematic."

 

As for how to come to this particular conclusion, you trace the character forms back to the original. Not just the forms of 主, of course, but also characters containing it. And what you'll find is that 主 and 示 were originally the same character, and 主 "split off" early on (that is, 主 is 示之分化字).

 

季旭昇《說文新證》 page 425 gives an abstraction of how this happened (note that the character on the left is the original form of both 示 and 主):

 

 

Marks are often added to characters for decorative/aesthetic purposes, and these decorative marks are often misinterpreted by later scribes, leading to structural changes and even the formation of new characters. That's what happened with 主/示. 

[anonymoose]

@OneEye Thanks. Very informative.

[mungouk]

I heard or read somewhere (I think it was a Coursera course about Chinese philosophy) that 王 represents the mandate of heaven, in that the top line is heaven, the bottom line is the people, and the middle is the Emperor who connects heaven to the people.

Did I dream this?

Is it real, or where did it come from?

 

 

[OneEye]

That's also from the Shuowen. Generally, these sorts of philosophical/mystical character explanations should be viewed as highly suspect. People were trying to solve a practical problem ("how should I write this spoken word?"), not philosophizing, when they created characters.

[mungouk]

Thanks, @OneEye ... so does this mean what we should disregard everything that comes from the Shuowen?
 

[OneEye]

It's hard to say you should disregard it altogether, as it's a massively important work, but you should always check it against something more up-to-date. A good book specifically for this purpose is 季旭昇《說文新證》. 季旭昇 is a very meticulous, highly respected scholar and does a really thorough job in this book.

 

Each entry presents the Shuowen's explanation, then reviews the paleographic and other evidence, and then corrects the Shuowen's explanation. Generally if there's not an entry in this book, it means either 1) you can probably trust the Shuowen's explanation, or 2) there's not enough evidence yet either way to know if the Shuowen got it right or not.

 

But to give you an idea of how many errors the Shuowen contains, 《說文新證》 is over 1000 pages.

[Sreeni]

What is etymology of 句 ?

 

句 jù  sentence Vs 句⧸钩⧸勾〔﹣⧸鉤﹔鈎⧸﹣〕 gōu to hook

anybody know brief background?