Studien zur Bildung und Entwicklung der keilschriftzeichen

On the basis of his knowledge of Chinese and Mesopotamian lexicographic works Yushu Gong tries to provide a skillful synthesis of the two different traditions and the studies developed by modern linguistics since the seventeenth century. He ends up establishing a very detailed typology of archaic Sumerian signs, by reducing the usual six classes of Chinese lexicography into three groups: pictograms, ideograms, and logical aggregates; and by borrowing a fourth class, one of arbitrary signs, from the School of Port-Royal and Ferdinand de Saussure. He divides the first three classes into several subclasses.