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Submissive woman or bound slave: interpreting oracle bone forms as a Rorschach test

Language Log 2026-01-21

We've been discussing the oracle bone form (late 2nd millennium BC) of nǚ女 ("woman; female"):

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File:女-oracle.svg

(WP)

I've always felt that it shows the profile of a submissive, kneeling female figure with her arms crossed in front of her (I say this after examining scores of variants of OB forms of 女).

Lately, however, some scholars have interpreted the oracle bone graph in radically different ways, e.g., the figure is a slave with arms bound in front of or behind him.

If that is the case, how do we get to "woman; female", which nǚ 女 (during the last three millennia), both by itself and as the radical (Kangxi no. 38) of hundreds (681) of other graphs having to do with women or feminine affairs / characteristics as it has indubitably signified during the last three millennia?

So I asked Axel Schuessler, the foremost etymologist of Old Sinitic, how he would interpret the oracle bone forms of nǚ 女.  He replied:

Chinese writing is sometimes like a Rorschach-test, everyone can see something different in the characters.
 
Here is my take: the OB graph shows a figure seen from the side. The figure is kneeling. This breast interpretation has never convinced me. What I see is a shoulder with arms, elbows extended to the sides. The top line of this ‘breast’ configuration shows the shoulder (with the stroke starting at top right) with the woman’s right arm curving down around her torso, the bottom line shows the left arm curving around the torso (again: from a side perspective). The arms/hands meet in front of the figure. This is exactly the pose found in theater performances when a woman is facing a person of authority showing respect, kneeling, arms extended with elbows out, hands coming together in front of her. In these gestures the hands wind up on top of each other or curled together like fists, if memory serves. Perhaps one can  also find this position in paintings. I don’t see any hint of bound hands or slavery. 
 
The graph for ‘mother’ 母, with the two dots that are really supposed to prove the breast theory. Again, I see this completely differently. Sometimes, a graph is created by using an existing one and then adding a dot or dots, strokes as diacritic for distinction. Sometimes the dot has the porpose of filling an area, like in 日, 月, 本. So 母 has the dots to indicate that 女 ‘woman is not intended, but ‘mother’. 
 
Anyway, this is a good Rorschach test.

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PS: à propos graphs being like Rorschach tests: the interpretation says sometimes more about the viewer that the graph itself. This graph meaning ‘woman’ makes people (naturally) look for anatomical markers, i.e. breasts; those living in a modern left ideology look for oppression of women everywhere and promptly find it, hence woman as slave.

I wish I could find paintings or photographs where you see a woman in exactly this kneeling pose with elbow pointed outward, hands joined, that made me immediately think that this is exactly what the OB have captured with a few strokes.

I think this is the sort of painting Axel had in mind:

(source)

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