Abstract
This paper focuses on two characters in ancient Chinese writing. One, hereafter referred to as a, was formerly misinterpreted as a variant of the character hui (叀), and the other, hereafter referred to as b, consisted of a and li (力). As b corresponded to the character zhu (助) in many ancient texts, many researchers thus thought that b was a variant form of zhu, while a was a word of similar sound to zhu and could be used interchangeably with it. After a careful analysis of dictionaries and relevant literature, this paper points out that there was a common word, lü (□), which had the same meaning as zhu. Because the latter character gradually became the dominant word from the Qin-Han period on, therefore in transmitted pre-Qin sources lü was often replaced by zhu, or mistaken as hui (惠). Therefore, in fact, the character that corresponds to b in the ancient texts should have been lü. In view of the above, this paper holds that b is in fact a variant form of lü. Meanwhile, noting its grapheme, pronunciation and meaning, a should have been the original way of writing lu (鹵), and in the unearthed documents, it was used as lü because of similar pronunciation.
Keywords
lü (□), zhu (助), lu (鹵), changes of common words, replacement of characters
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