A Comparative Study of Vessel Characters in Oracle Bone Script and Naxi Dongba Script
This study compares vessel/artifact characters (器物字) recorded in Oracle Bone Script (甲骨文) and Naxi Dongba script (东巴文), focusing on wine vessels, food vessels, and washing vessels. Through quantitative and structural analysis, the author finds the two scripts contain roughly similar total numbers of vessel characters (28 in Oracle Bone Script, 24 in Dongba script), but differ markedly in category distribution: Oracle Bone Script is rich in wine-vessel characters (46.43% of its vessel characters), reflecting Shang royal ritual culture, while Dongba script is dominated by food-vessel and especially cooking-utensil characters (87.50% and 45.83% respectively), reflecting everyday folk life. Both scripts form characters symbolically based on vessels' salient features, though Dongba characters retain stronger pictographic qualities. These differences reveal how royal/aristocratic versus folk/commoner cultural contexts shaped early writing systems' vocabulary and structural design.
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