Key concepts
These terms have fixed meanings on this site. Get to know them before reading the examples, writing an explication or joining a course.
New Six Scripts
Two Modes of form and meaning + Four Images of rationale, form, sound and intent, with the Five-Phase method and the trigrams.
Character rotor
A character's meaning is its rule of formation; the rule is embedded in the character, a self-referential mechanism.
Existence / generation track
The inductive, corpus-based track / the designed, compositional track.
Leave-one-out regeneration
Remove a reviewed reading and regenerate it from the components alone, to measure compositional consistency.
One source, two uses
A research entry is a teaching unit.
Meta-grammar
The ordering of the trigrams; Western subject-verb-object grammar is a degenerate special case of it.
Two Modes
The sound-independent core: meaning → form (indicative), form → meaning (pictographic).
Zili (rationale)
The reason designed into a character's make-up.
Form / meaning / rationale layer
Decidable / inducible / generable but not inducible.
Review status
Reviewed / pending / candidate — enforced at the content level.
Return to the source
Education aims to regain what one originally is and awaken innate wisdom, not to reshape from outside.
Yayan (elegant speech)
The earliest recorded pronunciation of characters, probably the original sound of Classical Chinese and of the script.
Four Images
The sound-related extension: rationale → form, form → sound, sound → intent, intent → rationale.
Common / design reading
The accepted understanding / the recovered rationale — outer and inner, not contradicting each other.
Ablation
The anti-circularity gate that tests a reading with a minimal pair (example: 田 / 由).
Family unit
The smallest teaching unit, holding at least one minimal pair.
Nine-square layout
The spatial layout of components and characters under the nine-square chart; yang left, yin right.
Five strands
Chinese teaching, AI courses, research, the classics library, traditional culture.
