The Collation and Editorial Standardization of Variant Characters in Dongba Dictionaries
Wang Juan examines how the two standard Dongba dictionaries -- Fang Guoyu's Naxi Pictographic Script Compendium and Li Lin-tsan's Dictionary of Moso Pictographs -- record variant characters (different written forms for the same word), finding 489 and 415 groups respectively under an improved broad-sense definition. She identifies systematic flaws in both: variant characters wrongly split across separate headwords, characters duplicately recorded, and near-synonyms mistakenly labeled as variants -- traceable to the compilers' differing linguistic training and the absence of any clear standard for identifying a variant group's original form. She proposes editorial standards for future Dongba dictionaries: treating mature Lijiang character forms as the default standard, supplementing from other dictionaries where needed, using corpus frequency statistics to help settle standard forms, selectively recording only variants reflecting original meaning, and consistently grouping variants under one headword -- ultimately recommending a dedicated variant-character dictionary compiled from the full Dongba scriptural corpus.
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