论汉字笔画

On the strokes of Chinese characters

通常认为汉字笔画是约定俗成的产物。这个说法掩盖了一个事实,即:现行笔画概念是早期书法笔画和明代与民国时期汉字排检笔画的混合物。书法笔画属艺术范畴,排检笔画是检索工具,二者在笔画辨识和分类归类上都采取主观标准,因人而异,很不确定。现代汉字学把笔画定义为"从起笔到收笔",与书法笔画和排检笔画无异,由此造成笔画问题聚讼纷纭。1965年颁布的《印刷通用汉字字形表》被视为笔画规范,其实与民国时期检字五笔画一致,至今未被普遍认同。从文字史来看,隶变后汉字形体不再是粗细一致的线条,出现了端点。端点是辨识、确定笔画的稳定可靠的外在标志。据此,把笔画重新定义为"汉字字形上由端点标识的一个片段"。本文提出了符合文字学标准的新笔画系统,共包括4类9种笔画。同时讨论了笔画的补偿机制。

It is generally accepted that the stroke order of the Chinese-character writing is established by usage, which covers up the fact that the existing stroke order of the Chinese-character writing is a mixture of the early calligraphic strokes（CS） and the catalogue-index character strokes（IS） of the Ming dynasty and the period of the Republic of China. The former belongs to the category of art, while the latter is an information retrieval tool. Both take subjective judgments on the stroke recognition and classification, and if following this principle, conclusions vary from one person to another. Modern Chinese philology defines ＂stroke＂ as ＂a trace left by a brush action from the start to the end＂, which reveals no difference from CS and IS and causes much controversy over Chinese strokes. A Table for the Printing Forms of Chinese Characters promulgated in 1965 was considered as the accepted stroke order of the Chinese-character writing but in fact it follows the Five Catalogue-Index Stroke System used in the period of the Republic of China, which has not been accepted widely so far. The history of Chinese characters shows that after the transformation of the seal characters to the official script （an ancient style of calligraphy current in the Han dynasty）, the stroke of Chinese characters was no longer the lines with the same diameter, because the endpoint appeared. The endpoint is the established external sign of strokes. Thus, the stroke of Chinese characters can be redefined as ＂a fragment of the Chinese character snipped by endpoints＇. With this, this paper proposes a new philological stroke system which consists of four categories and nine kinds of strokes, and discusses the compensation mechanism of such strokes.