Note: Before we get started here, I'd like to mention our motivation for making posts like these. It is not to show how we are going to explain characters in our dictionary. In the dictionary, explanations will be much shorter and more concise. But hey! This is a blog! Here we'd like to have a little fun and show how paleography really works to people who normally wouldn't get the chance. This can be difficult stuff (it's a graduate-level class in Taiwan, after all!), so please ask us if anything is unclear. We love talking about this stuff! We're here to help. Get ready for a wild ride. Here are some of the main ingredients for this post: tattooing people's faces, bloody battlefields with rotting corpses, ghost fire and rain dances!
Understanding Corruption in Chinese Characters (Part 2), by
Looking at the Etymologies of 黒, 粦, 無, and 舞
By Ash Henson
In the previous post in this series, the notion of corruption was introduced as well as the two main reasons it occurs: 1. the process of writing itself and 2. the…