Liding (Chinese: 隸定; pinyin: lìdìng; lit. 'identify in clerical form'), sometimes lixie (Chinese: 隸寫; pinyin: lìxiě; lit. 'write in clerical form'), is the practice of rewriting ancient Chinese character forms in clerical or regular script. Liding is often used in Chinese textual studies.
During the Han dynasty, the clerical script reached its matured form, in which Chinese characters became largely rectilinear and readily segmented into strokes. The script in current use, the regular script, inherited this feature. By comparison, the scripts prior to the maturity of the clerical script, including various scripts from the time period spanning the Shang dynasty, the Zhou dynasty, the Warring States era and the Qin dynasty, employed more sinuous lines, less stable shapes, and more ambiguous stroke segmentations.[1]
This remarkable difference in style, combined with the fact that the graphic structures of the characters have changed significantly over time, creates difficulty for character recognition and form analysis. Liding refers to the attempt to regularize the ancient scripts in (post-)clerical writing, so as to aid recognition of not only the characters themselves but their individual components.
In An Outline of Grammatology, Chinese paleographer Qiu Xigui defines liding as "the transcription of ancient script forms into clerical-style forms while preserving the shapes of the former".[1] The nomenclature clerically identified transcription is used by Chinese archaeologist Xing Wen, who gives as its definition "... a traditional Chinese paleographical practice for transcriptions of ancient inscriptions ... [that] identifies the Clerical Script equivalent of the ancient character".[2]
Despite the literal meaning of the name, liding in modern studies renders the character forms into regular script,[3] as it is what most modern writings and typefaces are based on. The term kaiding (Chinese: 楷定; pinyin: kǎidìng; lit. 'identify in regular form')[4][5] is occasionally used to specifically refer to liding in the style of regular script, albeit not as often.
A character that is the result of liding of an ancient graph is called a liding zi, or liding character (Chinese: 隸定字; pinyin: lìdìng zì).
Liding traditionally lacks a strictly-defined code of practice. While general definitions are given, Chinese palaeographers tends not to elaborate on methodological details.[3][6]
Sometimes, to specify how strictly the transcriptions adhere to the original graphs, the terms broad liding (Chinese: 寬式隸定; pinyin: kuānshì lìdìng) and narrow (strict) liding (Chinese: 嚴式隸定; pinyin: yánshì lìdìng) are used, although their exact meanings are left largely unclarified.[6] Chinese scholar Li Shoukui proposes the distinction between liding by strokes and liding by components:
The following table provides some examples of liding. In the "Possible liding" column, the graphs in each box are shown in increasing order of broadness. As is evidenced, the liding to one graph is often not unique. The ones provided in the table are not in any way exhaustive.
Historical form in question | Possible liding | Interpretation | Character explanation with modern Mandarin pronunciation | Comment |
---|---|---|---|---|
朕 | zhèn “I” | The forms in question are in Shuowen seal script.
| ||
送 | sòng "to see someone off"[9] | |||
[10] | [3] | 賢[11] | xián "virtuous" | The form in question is excerpted from Guodian Chu slips. It was equivalent to 臤, but the function of the filled block in the top right corner is unclear.[3] In the narrower liding form in the list, it is transcribed as 口. Where this uncommon feature is of any importance, it can be necessary to transcribe the graph narrowly like such, whereas it may be ignored in other contexts where it is insignificant. |
[12] | 得 | dé "to obtain" | Also from Guodian Chu slips. The liding form by components shows that the graph consisted of 目 and 又, therefore making clear the structure of the original graph to modern readers. The graph was a variant of the form (⿱貝又), the latter of which was the predecessor of 得 dé "to obtain".[13] | |
[14] | 得 | dé "to obtain" | From the inscriptions on Da Ke ding. The graph was another variant of that, as the liding-by-component form suggests, consisted of 貝 and 手. Compared with , one can see that two structurally distinct characters may be clerically identified distinctly from each other, although their interpretations might be the same. |
Despite the lack of a rigorous definition, liding is generally considered distinct from the other two methods of transcription:
However, it is worth noting that interpretative transcription is sometimes seen as a kind of broad liding.[3]
While liding refers to the transcription of archaic scripts in modern style, libian (Chinese: 隸變; pinyin: lìbiàn; lit. 'clerical change') is the natural evolution from ancient scripts to clerical scripts. As the graphs often underwent drastic structural changes in the process of libian, the liding of a character could be considerably different from the same character after libian. Taking 年 ("year; harvest") as an example:
In oracle-bone script | In small seal script | In clerical script | In regular script | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Route of evolution | 年 | |||
The liding forms | 秂[16] | 秊 | ||
Comment |
|
As a means of transcription, liding is an important part of the study of historical texts. It unearths structural information of the graph that was obscured by the archaic handwriting style, making it more accessible for modern uses. Additionally, the process of liding involves identifying the clerical counterparts of the various components of a character form, and thus in itself presents an analysis of the composition of the character in question. In research publications, liding is extensively used.[3]
Liding is also used for digitizing historical scripts. A number of historical text databases[17][18][19][20] with transcription provide liding versions of transcription.
Chinese dictionaries have, as a traditional practice, utilized the liding forms to record ancient variants in dictionaries. The Song dynasty saw the rise of epigraphy (Chinese: 金石學; pinyin: jīnshí xué; lit. 'the study of bronze and stone'); as a result, a number of character dictionaries and rime dictionaries at the time, including Leipian and Jiyun, preserved archaic variants in regular script. After Song, with the waning of traditional Chinese epigraphy, though the practice survived, lexicographers mostly took the archaic forms directly from earlier dictionaries like Yupian, Leipian, and Jiyun.[21]
For example, the image shown is the entry of the character 禱 excerpted from the Song version of Yupian.[22] As can be seen, a clerically identified zhouwen (Chinese: 籀文; pinyin: Zhòu wén; lit. 'the script of Shizhou'; a type of seal script from late-Western Zhou as recorded in the dictionary Shizhoupian) of 禱 is included.
The text in the image is read from top to bottom, right to left (the zhouwen liding graph is denoted by △ below):
禱。丁老切。請也,謝也,求福也。△。籀文。
("禱, 丁老 qie, which is to request; to thank; to pray for happiness. △ is the zhouwen.")
Entry form | Zhouwen as per Shuowen Jiezi | Zhouwen liding | Comment |
---|---|---|---|
禱 | [23] | dǎo "to pray" |
Rare forms encountered in ancient scripts are sometimes restricted to a specific period or even to a limited number of historical artefacts, and liding is a process that often requires fine structural differentiation; it is thus not unusual that character forms required in liding are unencoded in Unicode. Specialized fonts sometimes utilize Private Use Areas to store liding graphs that see non-oneoff uses but are unencoded.[24]
A number of liding-specific characters do have their dedicated Unicode code points. Notably, there are 1808 ideographs introduced from the work Yinzhou Jinwen Jicheng Yinde (殷周金文集成引得 [Concordance of Shang and Zhou Dynasty Bronze Inscriptions][25]), with 365 in CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C, 1410 in Extension E and 33 in Extension F.[26] The majority of them are liding forms of graphs found in the bronze inscriptions. Their kIRG_GSource
field values start with GZJW
.[27]
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)