Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72747&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-personal-encounter-with-the-submissive-woman-bound-slave-rorschach-test

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72747

[This is a guest post by Michael Broughton.]

I had an interesting Rorschach encounter with the oracle bone graph for woman a couple of years back. Oddly, this experience came in a rather roundabout way through an investigation into the character for interpretation, yi 譯. At the time, I was starting my Chinese translation business and wanted to come up with a meaningful logo for the business. I thought that an investigation into the character yi 譯 might help to inspire some ideas, and so I tried to do a little bit of digging into why it was written the way it was. Of note, the Liji (Book of Rites) has four characters for interpreting officials, as James Legge wrote in his elegant translation:

To make what was in their minds apprehended, and to communicate their likings and desires, (there were officers) – in the east, called transmitters (ji 寄); in the south, representationists (xiang 象); in the west, Di-dis (didi 狄鞮); and in the north, interpreters (yi 譯).

For me, there was something about the yi 譯 character that seemed fundamental to the nature of interpreting/translating. Obviously, the speech radical 言 on the side seemed to suggest that early forms of ‘translation’ were oral interpreting—as would naturally make sense in a predominantly pre-literate Zhou society. But I was more interested in right side of the character, having developed, in my earlier days, a keen interest in what was called youwenshuo 右文說, the idea that a character’s meaning is often conveyed by its phonetic determinative—the part of the character specifying pronunciation.

The right part of the character yi 譯 can be written as its own graph “睪,” and this has quite a few different readings—yi, ze, du and gao. It is used as the phonetic determinative for quite a few characters (the ze in xuanze 選擇 [choose] and Mao Zedong 毛澤東; the shi in jieshi 解釋 [explain]; the yi in yizhan 驛站 [an archaic word for a post station]). In all these words, the character was originally a specifier for pronunciation, and may, for some of them, even be a clue to a possible word family relationship (Axel Schuessler, in the ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese has  yi 譯 [interpret] yi 驛 [relay station] and shi 釋 [explain] in a broad word family). In mainland China today, the character 睪 has been simplified in all these characters to 译*, though in Japan, it has, for reasons unknown to me, been simplified into 尺.

[*VHM:  Only the phonophore on the right, which I am unable to type by itself; just imagine that the semantophore on the left has been stripped off.]

Looking up the character 睪 in the Shuowen Jiezi (c. 100 AD), I was interested to see that Xu Shen (c. 58-c. l48 AD) had glossed this character as something like “spy on,” with Xu Shen analysing the graph as a huiyi 會意 character made up of two combined semantic derivatives, mu 目 (eye) and nie 㚔 (an instrument used for punishment). Following the trail further, my oracle bone dictionary glossed nie 㚔 as a form of wooden handcuffs and presented some evocative early graphs that wouldn’t be easily interpreted as manacles today.

That the character for nie 㚔 is, in fact, a representation of some form of manacles is much more evident when we see members of the Shang and Zhou times wearing them, as we do in the oracle bone script for zhi 執 (which meant, in pre-Qin times, something along the lines of “to arrest”). Richard Sears’ painstakingly created (but unfortunately named) website, “Chinese Etymology,” has a great many oracle bone examples of the character zhi 執, which I have screenshotted below:

And thus it was, that as I was looking at these unfortunate pre-Qin captives, a strange thought crossed my mind. The position of the captive looked remarkably familiar, it was almost as though I had seen it before…where was it…ah, that’s right, the character for woman!

Could it be…were those tender hands in front originally bound by shackles. Was today’s lady unshackled, but still bound, her hands tied by the binds of the materially intangible but ever present patriarchy! The moment was a see-it-and-you-can’t-unsee-it one. Rorschach successful.

And that would have been the end of it, a moment of striking similarity and crazy coincidence, another exciting day in arduous challenge of learning Chinese. Except that…except that in 1937, a number of ceramic figurines were discovered in the Yinxu excavation site, some of the earliest figurines ever discovered. Figurines with their hands in shackles, some to the front, and some to the back. The Open Museum hosted by the Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures has a great close up of these (link here):

Could it be that the act of distinguishing female slaves from males was determined by the position in which their hands were tied? Perhaps captive ladies may have been seen as less dangerous, less prone to escape—hence the relatively more comfortable shackling position? If such character interpretation revisionism was allowed, imagine the flow-on possibilities.

Thus ends my own Rorschach experience with the lady of the crossed hands. As for the business logo, I took inspiration from the shackles. Perhaps translation and interpretation are, after all, about unlocking confusion and releasing meaning. The manacles alluding not to the binding, but rather the moment of words breaking free. Here is the final logo that came out of it. Thanks go to the captive slaves of the Shang and Zhou who inspired it.

Selected readings

• "Submissive woman or bound slave: interpreting oracle bone forms as a Rorschach test" (1/20/26)
• "Submissive woman or bound slave: interpreting oracle bone forms as a Rorschach test, part 2" (1/25/26)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72747&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-personal-encounter-with-the-submissive-woman-bound-slave-rorschach-test

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72747