Variant Characters in the Naxi Pictographic Dictionary and Related Issues
This article examines the variant characters (yiti zi) recorded in the Naxi Pictographic Dictionary (Naxi Xiangxing Wenzi Pu), compiled by Fang Guoyu and revised by He Zhiwu, one of the earliest and most comprehensive dictionaries of Dongba pictographic script. Because Dongba script is primitive in form and lacks standardization, it contains numerous variant characters, making their systematic study important for understanding the nature of the script, regularizing the writing system, and compiling future large-scale Dongba dictionaries. Using the strict linguistic definition of variant characters (identical pronunciation and meaning but different form, fully interchangeable), the author finds that the dictionary's editorial format for marking variants (via "yi zuo" or "you zuo") is inconsistent: some marked entries are not true variants (differing in meaning, pronunciation, or both), while some unmarked entries actually share variant relationships, and some headwords are duplicated or interrelated as variants. The paper systematically categorizes these inconsistencies—cases of same pronunciation/different meaning, same meaning/different pronunciation, and differences in both—arguing that sorting out this confusion is necessary for accurate statistical counts of headwords and variants in the dictionary.
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