Libian
Libian (simplified Chinese: 隶变; traditional Chinese: 隸變; pinyin: lìbiàn; lit. 'clerical change') refers to the natural, gradual, and systematic simplification of Chinese characters over time during the 2nd Century BC, as Chinese writing transitioned from seal script character forms to clerical script characters during the early Han dynasty period, through the process of making omissions, additions, or transmutations of the graphical form of a character to make it easier to write.[1] Libian was one of two conversion processes towards the new clerical script character forms, with the other being (隸定), which involved the regularisation and linearisation of character shapes.
Process[]
The earlier seal script characters were complicated and inconvenient to write; as a result, lower-level officials and clerics (隸; lì) gradually simplified the strokes, and transitioned from writing with bowed ink brushes to using straight ink brushes, which both improved ease of writing.
The complexity of characters can be reduced in one of four ways:[2]
- Modulation (調變): The replacement of character components with an unrelated component. For example, the ancient bronze form of 射 (shè; "to shoot an arrow") was written as
, however the left-side component became replaced with 身 ("body") during the transition to clerical script writing. - Mutation (突變): Some characters undergo modulation so suddenly that no clue hinting at the original form can be found in the new form. For example, the transition from the seal script character
("spring") to the clerical (and by extension, modern) form 春 completely drops any hints of the original 芚 component, instead replacing it with
