This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
氏
In brief: recording lineage to prevent marriage between kin
Common reading
Pictographic. The oracle-bone form depicts something about to topple being propped up; it is the original form of 支 (zhī, “to prop”). In ancient Ba and Shu, a jutting cliff about to collapse was called 氏: Shuowen, 氏 section: “In Ba and Shu, the side of a mountain bank about to fall is called 氏.” Original sense: the title marking a noble clan in antiquity. Yupian: “氏 means surname and clan name.” Note: before Qin and Han, 姓 and 氏 differed: 姓 was the root of 氏, and 氏 came from 姓. In the Xia, Shang and Zhou, 姓 marked the clan and 氏 the branches of descendants; after Han the two were used interchangeably.
Design reading
The left-falling stroke on top shows displaying outward (a family’s title); a vertical rising stroke joined on the left, the rising stroke going right to show the inside, together mean the inside of a family. The top left-falling stroke also shows corruption and withering, and with the vertical rising stroke shows a family’s corruption and decline. Within the left-falling, vertical and rising strokes, a horizontal crosses a right-falling-rising stroke, showing yin and yang joining; the right-falling stroke goes inward: marriage within the family. The meaning of the whole form is that marriage within the family leads to the family’s decline. So there must be surnames and clan names (姓氏), to record a family’s blood relations and prevent marriage between close kin. 氏 (shì) sounds like 是 (shì): both carry the sense of telling like from like, showing that same sound means same sense.
About this entry
This entry is taken from the edited manuscript of LI Xutong’s Exploring the Design Mysteries of Chinese Characters. The common reading follows traditional philology, the Shuowen Jiezi and other classics, and modern dictionaries; the design reading recovers the rationale of the character’s formation from the meanings of its strokes, the pairing of yin and yang, and the nine-palace layout, following the New Six Scripts. The premise of the design reading, that the generative mechanism of Chinese characters was designed, is an axiom of this system and differs from the evolutionary account usual in philology; the two readings are kept apart, as surface and depth.