Tongzi is a Chinese vocabulary, pronounced as t not ng ji m: zi. It refers to one of the phenomena of using Chinese characters in ancient books in China. "Tong Jia" means "universal and metonymic", that is, words with the same pronunciation or similar fonts are used instead of this word. Words replaced by common words are called "original words".
For example, "If a woman comes back, kill her." "Woman" means "you" in the sentence "finish killing".
Reason:
The ancients invented a word to express a meaning, but the thinking of which word to express which meaning is still in the process of formation, and there is no certain law. You can use this word to express a certain meaning, or you can use another word with the same or similar pronunciation to express that meaning Therefore, the older the times, the more interchangeable words there are.
When the ancients took notes, they couldn't think of this word at the moment, so they used other words instead. In the Qing Dynasty, Zhao Yi pointed out in his book A Collection of Texts: "If the pronunciation is the same but different, the vulgar Confucianism does not know it, so it is called a different language." Of course, the first person wrote a variant as mentioned above, but after all the later generations followed suit, it became a "legal" common word.
Due to the relative backwardness of ancient printing, coupled with the burning of war, a considerable number of original books were lost, which were later rewritten by some scholars as "bamboo and silk".
That is to say, the reciter recites orally, and the recorder records according to the sound, neglecting proofreading, so that the font is often corrupted. Due to the differences of dialects or the influence of education level, different writers often record the same word in different forms. Therefore, scholars in the Qing Dynasty, Wang Niansun and Wang and his son, said in their book On Righteousness: "The essence of exegetics lies in sound, not words."