An Exploration of Individualized Stylistic Variation in Dongba Character Forms
This article examines the phenomenon of individualized, personal writing styles among Dongba scribes when inscribing certain Dongba pictographic characters. Through close examination of Dongba manuscripts, the author identifies distinctive personal styles manifesting not only in habitual choices of characters for particular linguistic units, but more strikingly in the external graphic form of characters—including reversing the orientation of characters, omitting strokes, and creatively reshaping character structures. Case studies of scribes such as Dongzhi and He Wuyou illustrate these patterns using examples from the Harvard-Yenching Library's Dongba manuscript collection. Such personalized writing tends to be fairly stable, with forms inconsistent with the script's developmental trend eventually eliminated, while forms aligned with it are transmitted further. The author argues the root cause of this variation lies in the script's immature transitional stage toward a logographic-phonetic system, compounded by scribes' pursuit of novelty and aesthetic effect. These stable personal styles can help determine authorship and transmission lineage of unattributed manuscripts.
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