Once again, love is just a word of friendship. Zhang Chuanguan | Writing style | Text
When "love" appears in Chinese characters
What was she initially like?
In the long history of civilization
What are the changes in the meaning of love?
Flipping through bamboo slips, ancient books, and inscriptions
We follow experts in ancient script
Searching for answers——
Zhang Chuanguan, Associate Researcher at the Center for Research on Excavated Documents and Ancient Writing at Fudan University, said that the earliest confirmed "love" character can be found during the Warring States period and is generally written as "㤅". Love is a phonetic character, "heart" is a semantic radical, and "chi" is a phonetic radical. Although the pronunciation of "旡" and "love" in Mandarin is different now, in ancient times these two characters had similar pronunciations, so "旡" can be used as a phonetic symbol for the word "love".
Later, the writing style of "旡" gradually separated and became a new writing style of "爫+Ō", which is the source of the upper part of the word "love" today. And next to the "heart" of "love", for a long period of time, apart from subtle changes in form, it remained "heart" until it combined with "dou" and became the "friend" in the word "love".
Zhang Chuanguan said that this writing style did not only appear today. The "Chinese Calligraphy Dictionary" includes the character "love" written by famous scholars such as Su Shi of the Northern Song Dynasty and Liu Yong of the Qing Dynasty, which is almost the same as the writing style of "love" today.
Transforming the "heart" and "heart" below "love" into "friends" is actually quite ingenious. Experts point out that the side of "friend" also has a certain ideographic function, which can highlight the original meaning of "love" and clarify the previously difficult to explain side of "dou".
"Treating people or things with deep and sincere emotions" - This is the explanation of "love" in the Chinese Dictionary. By flipping through ancient books, we can feel a deeper emotional connection than the love of love. The line "I love you" in the Chu Bamboo Book's "Annals and Words" makes the sincere feelings of the king towards his subjects jump onto paper; During the Warring States period, inscriptions such as "self love" and "loyalty and love" were commonly found on the unearthed imperial seals. Ancient people carried the seals with them to encourage themselves
Final review: Zhang Yue, Yang Xia
Video: Pan Xu, Zhao Ge
New Media Center of Xinhua News Agency
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