A Preliminary Study of the Relational Characteristics of Variant Characters in Naxi Dongba Script
This article presents a preliminary study of the relational characteristics of variant characters (异体字) in Naxi Dongba script, a self-originated pictographic writing system used by Dongba priests of the Naxi ethnic group to record religious scriptures. Based on statistical analysis of the "Naxi Pictographic Script Compendium," the author identifies 489 groups of variant characters comprising 1,172 graphic forms—roughly half of the entire script system, averaging about three variant forms per recorded word. Adopting a broad definition of "variant characters" (including character combinations, per Zhou Bin's framework) rather than Yu Suisheng's stricter distinction between single characters and combinations, the study limits its scope to relationships within variant groups rather than across the whole system. The analysis finds that only 221 of 489 groups show variation due to minor stroke/form differences, challenging assumptions that primitive pictographic scripts inevitably produce large variant sets from small graphic discrepancies, especially for object-name characters like "sky" (天).
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