From Shaking to Battle: Thunder, Motion, Bodily Trembling, and Intimidation in the Old Chinese Sinographs 辰, 震, 振, 顫, and 戰

The present study is devoted to five Old Chinese sinographs: 辰 (chén)—“shaking, shuddering”; in the subsequent history of Chinese, also the fifth sign of the twelvefold cyclical system and the sign of the Dragon, the third lunar month, the period from seven to nine o’clock in the morning, celestial bodies, and time; 震 (zhèn)—“thunderclap, shaking”; 振 (zhèn)—“to shake, to agitate, to set in motion”; 顫 (chàn, zhàn)—“to tremble, to quiver”; and 戰 (zhàn)—“to fight, battle,” as well as “to tremble, to fear.” These sinographs belong to different periods of written history and different graphic series, yet Chinese sources preserve stable phonetic and semantic links among them. Their chronological and graphic heterogeneity prevents the analysis from being confined to later lexicographic classifications or from reducing the entire corpus to a single internal Chinese phonetic family. The study examines the origin of these links and the role of language contact in the formation of Old Chinese motion-related and military vocabulary. The source base comprises early Chinese written records, traditional lexicography, commentaries on the Shuowen Jiezi, paleographic evidence, reconstructions of Old Chinese pronunciation proposed by different scholarly schools, and Old, Middle, and later Iranian linguistic material. The historical background is provided by archaeological, anthropological, and genetic evidence of long-term contacts among ancient China, Central Asia, and the Eurasian steppe belt. The methodological foundation of the study is the author’s verificational analysis, understood here as a verification-based method. It does not reconstruct regular sound changes between related languages; rather, it tests whether Iranian sound contours could have been rendered through the Old Chinese syllabic system. Phonetic evidence is considered in conjunction with semantics, graphic structure, written chronology, historical channels of contact, and systemic relations within the corpus. The study tests whether the links among 辰, 震, 振, 顫, and 戰 are best explained by the internal development of Chinese, the convergence of originally independent words, or a more complex process of cultural and linguistic interaction.