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D. J. FINN
which is composed very much as the modern nose character of a phonetic and a pictogram, but here the parts are reversed, the phonetic is on top and the picture below; CH'IH is made up of J CHIH (itself a picture of a foot to which we shall come back) and a picture of the teeth in the mouth. This latter part is the whole symbol in the bone characters and appears as follows:-See Figure 3.*
The modern form is obvious as the result of adding the phonetic which indeed already appears in the modern combination on the Chou dynasty bronze vessels.**
L
This figure evidently bears out the passages quoted by M. Maspero. As to the cars, the modern character is the direct offspring of the pre-Han character (the Yin character is not known to me but the Greater Seal" or
Chou "symbol will do):---See Figure 4** and the development of the modern character follows this line :-See Figure 5.
Simple as the character is, it must be noted that the art of the calligrapher has obscured the anatomical correspondence of the symbol: the pictogram is that of a left ear and the old shape shows most clearly the concha as leading to the meatus with an indication of the intertragic notch; the upper black line suggests the start of the helix from the wall of the head and in the blank space between it and the central concha one must think the anti-helix and its fossa: the lowest black line is the most interesting as it suggests what most Chinese ears still show, sc. the lobule fusing with the cheek. This latter point together with the description of the ears as variance with each other,' in opposition" is borne out by a character which is however not yet deciphered but must be taken on its merits as a pictogram: See Figure 6. This may indeed be a barbarian but it shows a figure with car-rings depending from ears that stand out as continuations of the cheeks: this is a Yin character,***
At
That ends the survey of facial or head features and seems to point to the indigenous nature of the characters as conforming to certain consistent national traits, even if the examination of the Mojeno-daro characters did not give one already much less to fear from that possible source of cultural in- fluence.
Before concluding, I should like to handle the rather interesting CHI, now meaning to stop," etc. it occurred above as the phonetic part in the word for teeth": it is itself the pictogram of a foot and so appro- priately was set standing on top of the stand-like character for mouth-- though anatomically rather out of place. The development of this character shows that it came from a pictogram of a foot; originally either foot might be so used and one can distinguish them by the placing of the big toe: I take the left foot here for it is the one which has produced the modern character-See Figure 7.
(*See 殷虛文字類編 Bk, 2, p. 19),
(*** Bk. 12). (** See 說文古籀補
Some Physical Traits of the Chinese of the Second Millennium B.C. 225
Thus it is clear that the little stroke parallel to the base line and drawn about half way up is the big toe; the rest of the toes must be supplied by imagination as lying along a curve of which only the outer boundaries are indicated, this being a fairly common device in these characters, c.g. for the cutting blade of a knife which even to to-day is just the gap in the char- J. Now this prominence of the big toc shows the appreciation of people who go bare-foot (or the knowledge of people who experience not infrequent cases of amputation). In Aberdeen one can see how many of the boat-people (Tan Ka) bend their big toes up when walking. So at least one can conclude that bare-foot walking was a very usual thing when the characters were made.
acter
Might I again, in conclusion, stress the amount of interest to be derived from the re-examination of the new characters in the light of the oldest and that a real "naturalist" should find ample material there for research.
The Hong Kong Naturalist.
December 1932.
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