An Investigation of Structural-Type Combinations Among Variant Graphs of the Same Naxi Dongba Character
This paper investigates structural-type combinations among variant graphs sharing the same Naxi Dongba character. Based on statistics from 505 variant groups comprising 1,208 characters (averaging 2.4 variants per group), the variants are classified into seven structural categories: pictographic, associative-meaning (huiyi), indicative (zhishi), meaning-borrowing, phono-semantic, phonetic loan, and mixed types (huiyi-zhishi, huiyi-phonosemantic). Systematic analysis reveals that within each variant group, structural types may be either fully identical or partially different across the variants. The study quantifies these patterns from two angles—"completely identical" and "not completely identical" combinations. Among the 505 groups, 414 show identical structural types across variants, falling into eight combination patterns, with the pictographic-type combination being most common (248 groups, 49.11%). The findings aim to provide macro-level paleographic insights from micro-level combinatorial data, advancing ontological research on Dongba script variants.
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