Research On The Substitution Of The Phonetic Element Of The Variant Semantic-phonetic Characters In The Wei Jin Southern And Northern Dynasties Stone Inscriptions

Accounted for the turbulent society and inconstant governments, with the development of Chinese Characters and the enrichment of written materials, Variants mushroomed everywhere at the time of Wei Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties. As a very important written material, Stone Inscriptions preserved a great amount of Variants.To sort out and analyze the types and forming reasons of those Variants has a significant meaning of the research about the Chinese Characters of a given period.The research about the Variants preserved in the Stone Inscriptions dated from Song dynasty ,and the records about the Variants emerged from Lishi, a book written by Hong Shi. After that, the research achievements about Variants came out one after another, especially after the 1990s, Professor Wang Ning put forward a Chinese Characters' Forming Theory, a large amount of papers and works emerged out for the research about the Stone Inscriptions carved at the time of Wei Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties.Center for the Study of Chinese Characters and Their Applications in East China Normal University developed a database about Unearthed Stone Inscriptions carved at the time of Wei Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties. The total amount of those Characters amounts to 300,000,4800 left after subtracting those characters which appears more than once.We sorted out and analyzed those 2484 Pictographic Characters in this paper on the basis of this database, finding out that many of these words had Variants,and the reasons and forms are various ,some of them were formed because of the changes of the parts of Characters while some of them were formed by the changes of the whole character. In this paper, we sorted out those Variant Characters formed by the changes of the part showing their pronunciations. Aiming at differentiating the types of those Characters and their reasons and characteristics.According to our research, we divided those Semantic-phonetic Characters into five types, namely the substitutions of components with the same pronunciation, similar pronunciation, the addition and reduction of the components, markable component, similar forming. We find out that there are 16 words for the first kind, 38 for the second,5 for the addition and reduction and 7 for the mark component and 41 for the similar form.In this paper, we generalize the main reason and the characteristics of those substitutions of the Component indicating the pronunciation according to our analyze while considering the social backgrounds. We get the conclusion that the main reason for those substitutions are politics, written materials, time and place differents, different way of writing, and simplification. The main characteristics are easy to be influenced by the other components, analogy, simplification and irregularity .