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20.

it was written as   ,   The Sho-wen dictionary gave two interpretations: the first is that it is a picture representing the act of scorching the tortoise; the second is that it represents two fundamental strokes of the crack sign.  In the frist interpretation, the vertical stroke of the character was tken to be a symbol for the plastron, and the horizontal one, to signify the act of scorching; but this was based merely on the Small Seal form of this character.  Now in the oracle bone inscriptions, there are many variants of this character, and one may divide them into at least four major groups:        .  All these protray accurately the various crack signs.  What is peculiar and important is that the arrangement of the crack and the variant of the character are definitely correlated.  If the side stroke is on the right of the vertical in the crack, it also appears on the right in the character; if left, left.  Many hundred of the specimens have been examined, only few exceptions are found.  This is one of the most interesting discoveries that has been made.

What is even more interesting is that not only the shape of the character is pictorial in its early forms, its sound is also onomatopoetic.  In [[underlined] Wu-chung po-fa [[/underlined]], under plastronmancy, it is said that "Having been scorched, the tortoise shell makes a noise at the time of cracking'.  It is called 'Kuei-yü(龜語) or the talk of the tortoise'.  One day the tortoise was made to talk, by first preparing its undershell with all the necessary mechanical treatment and then have it scorched.  When the crack was about to take place, a noise occurred simultaneously.  The sound suggests exactly that of the character [[underlined]] po [[/underlined]].  It is probably the only Chinese character that still retains a sound traceable more than three thousand years back.