Nouns of Locality in Chu Bamboo Slips, Their New-Found Meanings and the Mindset of the Ancient People

Nouns of locality in Chu bamboo slips mainly consist of single morpheme words, which form a complete system of position expressions. These nouns have strong grammatical functions, many of which can be combined with other words, acting as a variety of sentence components. They can also be used as other words, while some characters of these nouns of locality were still not solidified. Compared with"Jiaguwen"and "Jinwen", the expressive abilities of Chu bamboo slips were greatly enhanced. The development and evolution of the nouns of locality and their new found meanings in Chu bamboo slips can reveal the characteristics of the mindset of our ancestors who lived in the warring states: their consciousness of orientation were gradually clarified; their abstract thinking gradually improved; they paid more attention to the ideas of rank, time and self from the perspective of spatial positions.