« Characters that refer to imagined words » (in Chinese)
Résumé
In this paper I would like to address the problem of characters that refer to non-exisiting words. All cultures or linguistic traditions have produced words that only refer to figments of the literary or religious imagination (the phoenix in Aegypt, the kūn fish 鯤, or the dragon in China), raising discussions on what could have been the reference for these incredible creatures. Yet, we can find a very different kind of imagined names produced by the users of the Chinese writing system. These represent graphic inventions. I will provide examples from Jiaguwen 甲骨文 to Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 to discuss this original feature. And I will show that if most of these characters are classified in today’s greatest Chinese language dictionary Hànyǔ dà cídiǎn 漢語大詞典 we find no trace of their use in the literature. We thus may wonder whether these terms were lost or could have represented lexicographs’s inventions.