Richard wrote:
>
> Dear Thomas Chan, Hi! can you please scan the character for
> Min River in Sichuan Province? where does the character first
> appear and what year. I hope you can give me some details
> about it, since I really need it for my research paper in
> school.
> P.s. Anybody here is also welcome to post any messages about
> this character.Than's a lot!!!
Okay, *which* particular character for the name of the river are you looking
for? There's more than one character that has been used for the "Min" part.
The _Hanyu Da Zidian_ 漢語大字典 gave ten variant forms for the character
岷, and in the course of scanning and reading the entries, I found an
eleventh. It seems that the name of the river is derived from the name of
the mountain. In that case, the one on vol. 1., p. 799 (which I've
numbered #9) seems to be the oldest version--it is documented in the _Shuowen
Jiezi_ 說文解字 (AD 100), but it has a seal form, which makes it much older
than that. The variants seem to be a combination of selecting different
phonetics and simplifying phonetics (maybe also some graphic confusion?) But
were all of these characters used for writing the name of the river, and not
just the name of the mountain?--I don't know. I also don't know when any of
these characters were first applied to the name of the river and not just the
name of the mountain. I think you will have to read carefully and maybe check
into the origins of this particular name of the river--maybe _Cihai_ 辭海 or
some other encyclopedic work might have something on it.
I've provided the bibliographical information on the dictionary and volume/page
references, so you can make a proper citation.
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu