In ancient books, Yangzhou also wrote Yangzhou, and Yang Xiong also wrote Yang Xiong. Why are there two ways to write it?

In ancient Chinese characters, similar words are often mixed, especially when making radicals, some words with very close glyphs are often mixed and difficult to distinguish. For example, there is only a difference between a picture and a scholar in stroke length, but this difference is easily overlooked in writing, so pictures and scholars in common ancient books are written in a glyph. For example, this is the case with Sheshe and Kyrgyzstan in the pictures listed above.

However, there will be some recognition problems when glyphs are mixed together, and words without distinguishing features will be confused. Therefore, in the process of evolution, writing conventions have formed a distinctive feature, so we can see that some ancient books have characters with soil as the radical, and there is an additional stippling ("she" as shown above) as a distinctive feature. However, some distinguishing features have not been preserved, only in handwritten characters, but not in block printing and printed characters.

Yang and Yang are not only mixed with wood and shovel, but also with the similar characters of "Yun" and "Yi". Examples of mixed use can be traced back to the Qin Dynasty. The word "Yi" in Qin bamboo slips is often written as "Cloud".

Knowing the mixture of the above words, it is not surprising to see Yang Xiong writing Yang Xiong of the Han Dynasty. Moreover, if we summarize some similar words according to this law, we will find many interesting phenomena of using words, which can be tried to explore. But in ancient times, handwriting was the main method, so it was easy to confuse similar words in the process of handwriting.

The word "Yang" in Cao Quanbei clearly shows that the right side is followed by "meaning" instead of "rhyme", which is a typical example of confusing rhyme and meaning.

Now that computers are becoming more and more popular, the confusion of glyphs may be reduced, but it brings problems such as "Internet cafes" being written as "turtles".

So from this point of view, ancient times paid attention to standardizing fonts, so a large number of word books appeared. Today, we should also pay attention to standardizing pronunciation to avoid generating too many loanwords.