Subject map
The backbone of the discipline is the three-step argument of LI Xutong's Exploring the Design Mysteries of Chinese Characters: a thesis (characters were designed), a theory (the New Six Scripts), and a verification that reads components, single-unit characters, compound characters and finally words and sentences, returning to the opening claim.
Part I — Thesis: characters were designed
1. Origins and the basic rationale
Design, not evolution; the origins of characters and of Classical Chinese; the basic rationale.
2. How the script developed
Continuity through change: wen and zi, the two transmissions, simplified and traditional forms, sound, culture.
3. Method
Language and meaning, self-definition, the River Chart and Luo Writing, the two modes, four images and eight trigrams, the three powers and five phases.
Part II — Theory: the New Six Scripts
4. The structure of characters
The theoretical core: the New Six Scripts, semantic structure, glyph form, the two modes and four images in detail, the Five-Phase method, the trigrams of characters.
Strokes and layout
What the basic strokes mean, how joins carry meaning, the nine-square layout and “yang left, yin right”.
Part III — Verification: reading the characters
5. Components of the regular script
The commonest components, non-character components, character components (including the stems and branches).
6–7. Single-unit and compound characters
About 280 single-unit characters; the layout of compounds and readings grouped by meaning.
8–9. Words, sentences and the rules of creation
Words pair characters within a semantic field by yin-yang and the four images; trigram order is a meta-grammar; seven rules of creation.
Three layers of research
Beyond the book, research is organised into three layers by how far each kind of property can be identified — the common spine of the database, the algorithms and the teaching units (see research method):
Form layer
Composition, nine-square layout, strokes, radicals. Decidable, with external ground truth; extracted deterministically.
Meaning layer (common reading)
Original meaning, classification, families, distributional semantics. Inducible, partly with ground truth; shown with probabilities.
Rationale layer (design reading)
Design readings, combined use of stroke meanings, yin-yang values. Generable but not inducible; checked by expert review and falsifiable tests.
