An Exploration of the Etymological Origins of Geba Script
This article reviews and critiques scholarship on the etymological origins of Geba script (a syllabic Naxi script distinct from Dongba pictographic script), surveying prior character-by-character source analyses by Li Jingsheng, Huang Zhenhua, Cao Xuan, He Zhiwu, Li Lincan, and Fang Guoyu, which variously trace Geba characters to simplified Dongba glyphs, altered borrowed Chinese characters, Tibetan letters, or independent invention. The author endorses Yu Suisheng's three guiding principles for such research and Yu Xingwu's attention to a character's form-sound-meaning relations and its relations to contemporaneous and later forms. Using comparative and source-tracing methods, the article then proposes or revises the etymologies of roughly a dozen specific Geba characters (for "you," "goat," "bowl/broken," "good/star," and others), correcting several prior misattributions to Chinese characters.
This page publishes the bibliographic record and the project's summary. The scanned article text belongs to its publisher and is shown to readers under a research-use policy; it is not reproduced in this record.