A Study on the Phonetic Symbols of Action Characters in Shuowen · Renbu

The study of Chinese philology has always been of interest to Sinologists worldwide. As a pictographic script, Chinese characters are divided into independent meaningful single-font character and composite characters made up of multiple elements. Some composite characters are formed by combining a meaningful symbol with a phonetic symbol, which are known as "semantic-phonetic characters (pictophonetic characters)". We have discovered that some semantic-phonetic characters also convey meaning, and the meanings they express belong to certain categories, reflecting the psychology of the people who created the characters and the cultural features of the Han ethnic group. In this article, we will conduct a thorough exploration of the behavior-related characters in Shuowen·Renbu, a monumental ancient Chinese work.