On the Usage and Meaning of Non-standard Forms of Chinese Characters

Many Chinese characters have uncommon forms which are derived from standard ones. Such an uncommon form of a character is called a non-standard form. A non-standard form of a character is occasionally used in place of the standard one. In other words, a Chinese character can be expressed in different forms beside the standard one. We need to study the usage and meaning of non-standard forms of a character from the viewpoint of the historical and literary significance of individual documents written in Chinese characters. When we study such usage, it is also neccessary to consider what non-standard character is used instead of the standard one and why. A Chiness character is originally a significant visual mark which conveys it's own meaning; however, it may be taken for granted that a non-standard form of a character shows quite the same meaning as the standard one. In many cases, a non-standard form of a character is carelessly transformed into the standard one, and no attention is paid to the fact that the author intentionally wrote in non-standard characters. We must acknowledge both the author's consciousness and the purpose of the writing, when we come across non-standard forms of Chinese characters. In this paper, I present 「部」 as an example. I am going to argue about the non-standard forms of the character (「部」) which come from variation of the right half of the character called "tsukuri" (「〓」 in this case), mainly by using some historical documents