On an Oracle Bone Script “Eagle” used both as a Function Word “only” and a Content Word “say”
The original graphs cannot be made up, they must have something like them. The meaning of a graph is what it looks like and its implication, which belongs to the content word (which carry semantic content). With the need of grammar, when the meaning of a content word does not indicate the meaning of the sentence, but the relationship between other content words in the sentence, the content word becomes a function word or grammatical word. A Shang bone script for god’s will, god said and someone said is dipected as wei隹 ( “eagle”). The consensus amongst the cycle’s scholars is that the word wei 隹 (only, along) is often seen and used as a function word in ancient Chinese classic books. At first, a script was created to describle the represented object and its symbolic meanings. A word in the Oracle Bone Inscriptions is used as a content word in most of the cases, and also used as a function word in a few cases discovered by scholars. Thus the word wei隹(bird pictograph) in the Shang bone texts first should be a content word, is a pictogram of the bird, in which its meanings were expressed iconically as “bird say, angel say, tell angel, talk by the messenger between man and god”. And in the later period of the Oracle bone text the script was added kou 口(oral) to emphasis “say” and became as a new graph wei 唯. The function word wei 隹 (only, along) can be derived from its content meaning “god says”, and the content word wei 隹 (say, tell, allegedly) can be used to read the Oracle bone and the Bronze inscriptions and the classic books in their literal sense and logically, and to give an answer to some puzzling problems in the inscriptions. Through this discussion, we have used many examples of Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Jinwen, in which there are many undeciphered words. The purpose of this paper is to show how to decipher the Oracle bone scripts by using these undeciphered words. The key point is that the meaning of Oracle bone script comes from its shape, not its sound.