To Study The Nature Of Chinese Characters And Relevent Studies

The nature of Chinese characters is a basic and core subject in Chinese philology, the recognition of nature of Chinese characters directly or indirectly influences the aspects of Chinese philology, including the theory and application. However, because of some reasons, the academic field holds controversial ideas as to the nature of Chinese characters. This is why I wrote this thesis. Firstly, the paper gave a overview of achievements on nature of Chinese characters what our predecessors and instructors had done. Then analyzed concrete arguments: historical and academical background, terms, research object, layer, the definition of the nature, criterion of judgment. The last two topics are the core reasons, we analyzed them and knew that scholars' knowledge about the nature of Chinese characters are gained by means of categorizing the writing systems in the world, and that they judged according to one or two of the three elements: figure of writing systems, the relationship of language and writing systems, character symbol. After a concrete analysis of each element, we came to the conclusion that the type of characters and the nature of characters are different things,the latter is the essential attribute of the characters. We can categorize character systems from different points of view, and maybe a certain character system falls into different types according to different criterion of categorization. So, not all types have relations with the nature of characters because the nature is steady. The stability of the nature of characters is not in contradiction with a variety of types. The nature of characters is that how a specific character created and kept up with the requirement of the development of a language, and how the restrictive relationship established between a specific character and a language. It is important to the nature of a certain character system whether it is an endogenous character system or an exogenous character system. As a endogenous character system, Chinese characters has its special nature. Chinese language, as an isolating language, had a rigidly orienting restriction to the creation and development of Chinese characters, and Chinese characters geared itself to adapt and react to the development of Chinese language.