To logically emphasize a particular part of a sentence, a special emphatic construction is used in archaic Old Chinese. The emphasized part of the sentence is firstly marked with an emphatic particle; secondly, if it is the subject or object, this part of the sentence changes its usual position.
Two emphatic particles are characteristic of the archaic language: 唯 wéi and 叀 huì. The most common is 唯 wéi.
It may seem strange that the word 田 tián had two seemingly completely different meanings in archaic Old Chinese—"field" and "hunt." In reality, these two meanings were organically linked.
During the Yin Dynasty, the ancestors of the Chinese practiced shifting agriculture: grass and shrubs in forested areas were burned and dug up for arable land. After a year or two, the area was abandoned. The field would regenerate, wild animals would feed on it again, and it would, as before, become a hunting ground.
The climate on the Central China Plain during the Yin Dynasty was much warmer than it is today. This explains the seemingly strange fact that the Yin people hunted wild animals that today live much further south.
The hunters' prey then included elephants and rhinoceroses.
The reliability of this information, conveyed by oracle inscriptions, is confirmed by the study of animal bones discovered during excavations of the Yin capital.