汉字构件“口”构意溯源考察

Abstract

As a language writing symbol inherited by the Chinese nation for nearly a thousand years, Chinese characters have obvious ideographic characteristics, and the components of Chinese characters play an important role at the ideographic level. Different components are combined with each other to jointly participate in the overall formation meaning of Chinese characters. Therefore, the interpretation of the shape and meaning of Chinese characters is naturally inseparable from the study of components. After the development and evolution of Chinese characters in the past dynasties, both the overall shape and the partial components of the characters have changed over time. Modern Chinese characters use common regular script. If we trace and explore its specific components in combination with past dynasties, it is not difficult to find that the meaning and source of the component itself may be more than one. In modern Chinese characters, there are a large number of Chinese characters with component “口”. In most cases, the component “口” plays the formation meaning function of “mouth”. However, if we trace the origin of the Chinese characters containing the component “口” and start from the early forms of the relevant Chinese characters, we can discover a variety of formation meaning functions of the component “口” except "mouth". Through research, this paper finds that the modern Chinese character component “口” not only means “mouth”, but also has other formation meaning functions such as “ware”, “symbol” and “range”. For the research on the origin of the formation meaning of the Chinese character component “口”, the related academic achievements still need to be improved. This paper has the significance value of exploring and improving the multiple functions of the specific components.