The design of Chinese characters
Our research and teaching rest on one central claim: Chinese characters were designed as a whole, at once, rather than evolving by accretion; every basic character encodes a rationale about the world and life — its zili. That rationale can be recovered systematically, and taught systematically.
What we study
The make-up of a Chinese character is a structure of relations among form, meaning and sound, at three levels: within a single character, among a group of characters, and across the script as a whole. This discipline asks where that structure comes from, by what rules it is built, and how it can be learned.
The central claim Axiom
These belong to the author's position; we keep them whole and do not replace them with more “neutral” wording, while marking them as premises (axioms) of the system rather than empirically established conclusions. We draw the line against the evolutionary account usual in Chinese philology instead of blurring it: every explication gives the common reading (the accepted scholarly and everyday understanding) and the design reading (the rationale recovered from how the character was built) separately.
Two lines of thought
| Line | Question | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| Formation (the New Six Scripts) | Why are characters built as they are? | Two Modes of form and meaning + Four Images of rationale, form, sound and intent, extended by the Five-Phase method and the trigrams; the character rotor |
| Education (the return to the source) | What is education for, and how? | Education helps people regain what they originally are; it makes explicit the yin-yang and four-image properties and rationales lost in modern teaching |
The two lines meet in the rationale itself: it is what research recovers, what teaching passes on, and the source to which education returns. Research, teaching and cultural transmission are therefore three faces of one task — on this site, every research entry doubles as a teaching unit.
Relation to the Science of Generation Method
This project instantiates LI Xutong's Science of Generation (conceptual generation theory) in one concrete sign system, Chinese script; it is a field where that system is applied and tested.
| Science of Generation | In the study of characters |
|---|---|
| Mutual arising (relations before entities) | Form and meaning arise from each other as yin and yang, not as sign and referent; paired characters are designed in pairs |
| The rotor (self-defining mechanism) | The character rotor: a character's meaning is its own rule of formation |
| Dual-track conceptual generation | Existence track (common reading, corpora, induction) / generation track (design reading, composition) |
| Proper classes, non-well-founded self-reference | A component that is also a character makes the formation tree self-referential |
| Circular recognition | Character families define one another and must be presented as wholes |
