**Questioning "A Comparative Study of Naxi Dongba Script and Oracle-Bone Script"**
This article by Yu Suisheng challenges Li Jingsheng's claim, made in "A Comparative Study of Naxi Dongba Script and Oracle Bone Script," that character pronunciation historically evolved from complex to simple. Li had argued that since compound Dongba pictographs often read as many syllables as their component parts, oracle-bone ideographs likely originated as multisyllabic forms that later simplified. Yu disputes this inference on two grounds. First, Dongba compound characters and oracle-bone ideographs encode linguistic units of different sizes: Dongba compounds often represent polysyllabic compound words formed by combining morphemes, whereas oracle-bone ideographs, regardless of structural components, each record a single monosyllabic morpheme/word, so the analogy is invalid. Second, using numerous Dongba examples, Yu shows no strict correspondence between the number of graphic components and syllable count—simple characters can represent compound words, and compound characters can represent single morphemes or even phrases—undermining Li's "several forms, several syllables" generalization.
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