Chinese and Sumerian

AND THE SUMERIAN PARALLELS Ivf

cuneiform disguises of the old pictorial symbols suggest something to the eye, even if it be something entirely different from the import of the original characters. The immediate significance of the primitive ideograms was inevitably obscured in the process of their gradual transformation from linear figures to more or less broken groups of arrowy lines and curves; but in some cases at least these new groups have been so arranged as to suggest a combination of other and simpler cuneiform characters. The like tendency to invest altered forms with a new suggestiveness, and so to make what has become non-significant again significant, accounts for many of the variations of the old Chinese characters.

A remarkable example in Sumerian is ~?"Y HY, the pig-symbol, now compounded of rey ITI or ITU, month, and SHY NIR, SHER, lord or hero; an apparent allusion to DUMUZI, Tammuz, the god after whom the fourth Babylonian month was named, and to whom the pig (wild boar) was sacred in legend (see PSBA. xvi. 198-200), But in all probability neither this nor the closely related character <fEyyyy DUN, éo dig, had anything to do originally with the symbol yy} which is an element in the cuneiform equivalents of both. Already, indeed, the oldest forms of the two ideograms known to us at present have assimilated their lower segments to the linear shape of this character (f D. 18 and D. 250¢. D. 73), but the upper segment is still unexplained ; and analogy suggests that the linear form of >=} EVV SHAG, SHIG, SIG, wild boar, swine (cf. the old Chinese shik, pic), originally figured the head of a boar with tusks and mane, while <JE}}{¥ DUN, zo due, like the corresponding Chinese word and symbol, is a modified form of the swine-symbol based on the animal's well-known characteristic of rooting up the ground. Sve Sign-list, Nos. 71 and 72, and Lex. s.v. DUN, Zo dig; SHAG, SHIG, swine; and KISH, a swine, answering to Chinese ki, ki-t, the so-called pig’s head, Rad. 58, which is curiously like the top of the two Sumerian characters in their oldest accessible forms.

For other striking examples of this kind of novel conversion or perversion of ancient pictograms, see p. 25 zfra.

(iv) Aiar-shing or Hing-shing, ‘Agreeing sounds’ or ‘F iguring sounds’, 7. e. Phonetic characters. We have here a very extensive class of signs, both simple and compound, the principle of which consists in the borrowing of a word-symbol already in use, to become the symbol (or part of the symbol) of another word of like sound but (generally) different meaning. There are in Chinese about 1040 principal Phonetics (also called Primitives), by the union of which with the 214 Radicals or generic Determinatives the great mass of the characters has been formed.

Thus in 7]. &ang, ‘river’, we see the Radical or Generic Determinative y shut, ‘water’, with J £ung, ‘work’, added as a Phonetic to suggest the sound (originally kong, kom: P. 27). In Jay ho, ‘river’, the Phonetic is BY] #0, ‘may’, ‘can’, indicating that Ao, ‘river’, was formerly £0, (Both words were originally ka-t or ga-t: P. 145.)

1601 D