A Comparative Study of Variant Characters in Dongba Script and Shui Script
This paper by He Baozhi (Institute of Chinese Language and Documents, Southwest University) presents a comparative study of variant characters (异体字) in the Dongba script of the Naxi people and the Shui script of the Shui people, both underdeveloped religious writing systems. The comparison focuses on three aspects: causes of variant-character formation, the number of variants among commonly used characters, and character-creation methods. The study finds that variant characters in the Shui script are more widespread and structurally more complex than those in Dongba script. Regarding formation, Dongba variants arise from both internal linguistic factors (its ideophonographic nature, pictographic and low standardization) and external factors (regional differences, creators' varying perspectives, and historical development). Notably, the presence of phono-semantic compound characters among Dongba variants indicates that Dongba script is more developmentally advanced than Shui script.
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