ABSTRACT
Zhouyi is written in Early Old Chinese. 1 Only relatively recently have studies of oracle bone and bronze inscriptions given us better grammatical understanding of this language. Yet difficulties remain. Many of them are inherent in all ancient Chinese writing. Verbs have no active or passive voice, no person, no tense, no mood; nouns have no singular or plural, and no case. Most words can be used as several parts of speech, and some of those that usually function as grammatical particles can also be used as nouns or adjectives, adverbs or verbs. The subject of a sentence is not always mentioned. There is no punctuation, even when the placing of stops is vital to clarity of meaning.
