A Preliminary Study of the Reasons for Rebus Borrowing Where a Proper Character Already Exists in Naxi Dongba Manuscripts
This article investigates why Dongba pictographic texts of the Naxi people sometimes use phonetic loan characters (jiajie) even when a proper, unambiguous character already exists for the intended word—a phenomenon traditionally dismissed as mere careless miswriting. Drawing on three major source collections (Fang Guoyu's Naxi Pictograph Compendium, Li Lin-ts'an's Moxie jingdian yizhu jiu zhong, and Fu Maoji's study of the "White Bat's Search for Scriptures" manuscript), the author analyzes numerous examples where existing characters were bypassed in favor of borrowed ones. The study identifies five main motivations: distinguishing homophonous meanings, avoiding repetition of characters within a passage, pursuing novelty or stylistic variation, non-standardized orthographic practice, and imitation of archaic usage. These findings offer a preliminary framework with reference value for understanding similar loan-character phenomena in other ancient writing systems where proper characters existed but were nonetheless substituted.
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