Microsoft Teams: https://go.um.edu.mo/7mnk1eav   Abstract Although sinologists have long debated the existence of metaphor in ancient China, the word often regarded as the classical Chinese equivalent of “metaphor/analogy,” yu 喻, has received relatively little scholarly attention. This lecture offers a new account of the semantic development of yu, drawing on recent paleographic studies of the etymology of yu 俞. In oracle bone inscriptions, yu originally denoted “traveling along a river in a boat” or “crossing a river.” This core meaning later differentiated into words within the same phonetic series expressing physical and abstract forms of “carrying over”: in the physical domain, yu 逾/踰 “to cross over” and shu 輸, “to transport”; in the abstract domain, yu 喻/諭 “to convey, to […]