Liu, a first-class Chinese character, pronounced Li, was first seen in Oracle Bone Inscriptions. Originally meant to kill people, it later extended to weapons such as axes and cymbals.

Shuowen Jiezi may have been lost because of avoiding the surname Liu of Emperor Gaozu, but there are some words with Wei Liu as the radical, and the word was not found in the historical biography. On this basis, Xu Kai concluded that the traditional "Liu" was mistaken for "Tian" because of the inflexion of "Tao".

The origin of Chinese characters

There are two main views on the etymology of the word "Liu", except that some people think that the word "Mao" is the original word of the word "Liu" and that the word "Liu" is derived from the word "Mao" plus "fresh" (knife) and the symbol "gold".

First of all, the variant of the word "Liu" first appeared in Shuowen Jiezi, but the word "Liu" has not been found in Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Jinwen.

The word "Liu" in seal script has the word "Jin" on the left, with the word "Mao" on it and the word "Dao" below, or the word "Dao" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions is changed to "Tian" and "Qi", which means killing people.

Secondly, the word "Liu" was originally an pictographic character, and later it developed into a knowing character. On the left of the word "Liu" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions is an animal pictogram shaped like a big bird, and it is also like an artistic person. On the right is the pictogram of a knife, which means "stabbing an animal or a person to death with a knife", intuitively expressing the original meaning of the word "Liu"-killing.

In the bronze inscription stage, the configuration of the character "Liu" has changed greatly-from the original pictograph to a pictophonetic character with both sound and meaning: there is a word "Mao" on it, which originally means "fetal placenta separation" and can be extended to "separation", "tearing" and "killing", and it is also pronounced here; The lower left part is "gold", originally meaning "metal", which represents weapons or weapons here;

The lower right part is "hand", which means "holding it with your hand" here. Together, the three are "killing people with weapons", which is the original meaning of the word "Liu". There are two ways to write the word "Liu" in the stage of Xiao Zhuan. The first way of writing "Yue" is a pictophonetic character with golden characters, which is found in Shuowen Jiezi and later developed into "Yong" with gold plating;

The second traditional way of writing "Liu" was born out of the bronze shape of the word "Liu", but it has also changed-it has become a left-right structure: on the left is the combination of "Mao" and "gold"; The word "hand" on the right has been replaced by "knife", which has become the understanding word of Mao, Jin and Dao, and its meaning is more clear. The word "six" in official script and regular script continues to evolve on the basis of the second structure: "Dao" is changed to "Xian".