Use of the asterisk in Fuller

[Renacido]

I see that several users here are using Michael A. Fuller's An Introduction to Literary Chinese. Does anybody know what the asterisk before some entries in the lesson vocabularies mean? For example:

*伐 fā [lesson 1]

*遽 jù [lesson 4]

*鬻 yù [lesson 5]

[Jose]

Nobody knows. I asked this same question once in the old thread we have about Fuller's book (see comments #13, #15 and #17), but we were unable to find any explanation. Neither the book explains what the star means nor is there any identifiable common feature shared by those starred characters. My guess is that it may have been some internal code used while the book was being written that made it past the proofreading stage by mistake.

[aristotle1990]

Why can't you just email the guy?

[Renacido]

I just came back to this forum... I sometimes just forget to check threads I opened in new forums I join.

Why can't you just email the guy?

That is actually a sound idea. I'll e-mail him right now.

[Renacido]

Hi guys, mystery solved.

Here's Michael Fuller's reply (posted with expressed permission):

You're entirely right that nowhere in the book do I actually explain what those asterisks are for. In part this is because I never produced a "teachers' copy": for my own students I say that they need not remember these characters, or in the case of fa, the use of the character. They are simply too rare to spend too much time on. However, I don't want to prevent other teachers from having higher standards and requiring those characters/usages as well.

(By "fa" he means the 伐 fā 'to boast' example I posted in post #1.)