A Study of Compound Characters in Dongba Script
This article studies "hewen" (合文, compound ligature characters) in Dongba script, the pictographic writing system of the Naxi people, which remains at an early logographic-morphosyllabic stage and thus retains many archaic features, including numerous compound characters. Building on prior scholarship (notably Yu Suisheng's distinction between "zizu" in Dongba studies and "hewen" in ancient Chinese paleography), the author redefines Dongba hewen as combinations of two or more independent single characters that jointly record a word, phrase, or sentence, where only the sounds of the constituent characters are pronounced (no extra reading) and the components are visually fused into a tight, unified shape. Using Fang Guoyu's authoritative dictionary "Naxi Pictographic Script Compendium" as the primary corpus, the study exhaustively catalogs and statistically analyzes all hewen instances according to five dimensions: number of components, component structure, component position, component function, and component pronunciation, aiming to clarify the origin, development, and structural typology of Dongba script.
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