Search for Lishu character possible?

[CWTurner]

I would like to find a particular Lishu character from a scroll I have seen, but can't figure out if it is possible to do this <without> knowing the modern character form. And I don't! Can anyone advise if this is possible? I tried handwriting the character in Li style but no luck.

 

[Shun]

Hi CWTurner,

it probably can't be done automatically by drawing a 隶书 character in a character recognizer, but if you can find a table of all 2000-4000 common 隶书 characters, finding a particular character should be a relatively quick process. (It should be even quicker if they are ordered by radicals, of course.)

You could also run a couple of guesses through this Chinese character search engine, it has a lot of pictures of 隶书:

书法大师_书法字典_汉字书法写法_书法大师书法作品欣赏_中国书法大全 - 国学大师

Hope this helps (at least a bit),

Shun

 

[JD]

I would like to find a particular Lishu character from a scroll I have seen, but can't figure out if it is possible to do this <without> knowing the modern character form. And I don't! Can anyone advise if this is possible? I tried handwriting the character in Li style but no luck.

You could post a picture and see if anybody recognizes it.

 

[CWTurner]

I've not been able to find the character in the Li dictionaries I have. Thanks for the suggestions. Here is a photo of the character, taken from Deng Shiru's four hanging scrolls of "Master Cheng's Admonition on Seeing, Hearing, Words and Actions":

Thanks for all the help.

 

[Shun]

You're welcome!

Right after rizen: I'm not a 隶书 expert, but shouldn't it be this character (a variant form of 哲, with the two horizontal stroke having been merged into one)?



I've enabled the full set of recognizable characters under Settings > Handwriting Input.

 

[jurgen85]

You could ask Chinese StackExchange, they often have good answers to these kinds of questions. In my amateur opinion it could be 喆, as 土 tǔ and 士 shì were historically substituted in other characters like 在.

 

[CWTurner]

Ah, I was thinking it was "cao" the grass radical over one horizontal stroke. rizen and Shun I think you are correct, certainly makes sense in the translation I do have of this calligraphy. I am very grateful to you both for the help. I have a couple of other characters that are unclear, that I think I'll put on Chinese StackExchange, jurgen85, thank you very much too.

 

[JD]

Ah, I was thinking it was "cao" the grass radical over one horizontal stroke. rizen and Shun I think you are correct, certainly makes sense in the translation I do have of this calligraphy. I am very grateful to you both for the help. I have a couple of other characters that are unclear, that I think I'll put on Chinese StackExchange, jurgen85, thank you very much too.

Did you try turning on the full handwriting stroke recognition (as @Shun said) and see if it finds anything? When I tried drawing your posted pic, it popped right up in Pleco as one of the suggestions. You could try that with your other images.

 

[CWTurner]

JD, yes, as soon as I saw Shun's post-- and I am continually surprised by the parts of Pleco I haven't utilized! : ) Your suggestion is a good one and I'll keep niggling around in my searches.