Innovation Of Semantic And Phonetic Chinese Character System

This paper presented the research results of a semantic and phonetic Chinese character system known as the Yiyin System. The paper highlighted the system's structural composition and its advantages over other invented Chinese character systems in terms of its traditional aesthetic shape of characters, its ease of learning and use, and of its capability of solving homophonic problems .Chapter One begined with a literature review of Chinese characters: the origin, evolution, past research, reforms and lattest findings. Next the author discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the present Chinese character, Chinese Pinyin, Romanised Chinese systems, and some other newly innovated standardised pictophonetic character systems. The auther then introduced the Yiyin System. In Chapter Two the advantages of the Yiyin System compared with two other newly innovated standardized pictophonetic systems were demonstrated.Chapters Three to Five discussed in great detail the semantic, phonetic and character-formation aspects of the design and constructtion of the Yiyin System which contains three types of characters: semantic and phonetic (Yiyin) character, foreign phonetic character and reserved Chinese character. The Yiyin character was constructed from a semantic component (yimu) and a phonetic component (yinmu) in left-right position occupying equal dot-matrix standard spaces of 7x15. The yimu indicates the scope of meaning of the character. It is a symbol derived or modified from commonly-used Chinese charater radicals or parts. The system has 50 fundamental yimu symbols, which have been expanded to 110 by altering their left-right positions or by modifying them with adding simple strokes. The yinmu consists of over 40 phonetic symbols including alphabetic symbols (yinzi), tone symbols, and some special symbols. These symbols were all derived from Chinese character strokes. They were arranged and pronuounced phonologically according to the regulations of Hanyu Pinyin. Foreign phonetic character is a special type of Yiyin character which may contain pronounciations not within the Beijing Phonological System. They are used mainly for translating foreign names of people, places, organisations, and academic terms. Reserved characters consists of a total of 104 commonly used Chinese characters. Approximately half of them can be composed from among the selected chararcters with the addition of special symbols or from two yimus.A special feature of the new system is its ease of learning and use. A learner only needs to master over 30 yinzsi, approximately 80 yimus and 50 non-radicle oriented reserved characters in order to read and write most of corresponding Yiyin characters. The average number of strokes of characters in the Yiyin System was estimated to be 7.6, which is less than that of existing simplified characters. A search in Xinhua Dictionary which collects over 10,000 characters showed that the highest number of strokes among converted Yiyin characters was 14, which occured only once. The second highest number was 13, which occured only ten times. Another search showed that the system was free of structural similarity.Chapters Six and Seven explained how the new system tackled existing phonetic, morphological and word-formation problems by means of its specially designed symbols. It was illustrated that the system provided a plateform for unifying all foreign translated terms and expanding the range of Chinese syllables. Chapter Eight showed examples of selected poems written in Yiyin characters in regular Kai, Song, Fangsong, Xingkai, Fangzhuan (imitation of Zhuanti) and dot-matrix typefaces. The author also established a conversion table of over 3,500 commonly used Chinese characters into Yiyin characters without isomorphs (homophones having the same yimu) as detailed in chapter 9. The result clearly shows that the system can easily handle the problem of homophones. In addtion, the paper also elucidated, with concrete examples, how the system was able to solve the problem of isomorphs arising from the conversion of 3 highest-frequency syllables ji, yi, yu contained in Xinhua Dictionary, and further suggested additional solutions for other vocabularies that might give rise to more isomorphs. Finally the author proposed a gradual and orderly reform implementation strategy, comprising five stages spanning a total period of 50 years, to integrate Yiyin characters into the Chinese character system, in order to enable people in the older segment of the population to cope with the reform and change in the character system.