A Study On Variant Pronunciation Characters In Modern Chinese Dictionary

The preface of Modern. Chinese Dictionary says, 'This dictionary services for promoting mandarin and Chinese standardization, including the form of Chinese characters and words, pronunciation of characters and paraphrase.' But since Modern Chinese Dictionary published and revised,there are still large number of variant pronunciation characters exists in it,and phonetic notation of these characters is very messy. Obviously, this situation is conflict with the aim of the editors of Modern Chinese Dictionary.As the number of people using Chinese increasing, it's urgent to think about how to regulate variant pronunciation characters. In order to standardize the language, this thesis analyzes all of the variant pronunciation characters in each version of dictionary, and tries to solve the problem by seeking causes of these characters. By analyzing the increase or decrease of variant pronunciation characters, it's not difficult to find that the fundamental cause of variant pronunciation characters is that Modern Chinese Dictionary has no objective and single standards of revising and marking pronunciations. So,we think that establishing consistent standards of revising and marking pronunciations is the key to solve the problem.This thesis includes five chapters. Chapter 1 is an induction, it's focus on defining the connotation of modern Chinese variant pronunciation characters, briefly describing phonetic situation of variant pronunciation characters in Modern Chinese Dictionary, and the current state of research on variant pronunciation characters in Modern Chinese Dictionary.Chapter 2 briefly introduces the modes of marking variant pronunciation characters in each version of Modern Chinese Dictionary.Chapter 3 analyzes variant pronunciation characters those experienced phonetic changes from the perspective of etymology, and sorts out the causes of variant pronunciation characters. The causes of variant pronunciation characters are different, but we can summarizes five factors which resulted in variant pronunciation characters through classifying them. They are dialect,literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters, the pronunciation of a character changes when it's in a word read together, a character records multiple words, misreading. Among them, the factor 'a word record multiple words' can also be subdivided into special words, common words, foreign words, ancient words and a word has two kinds of form. According to the analysis of the causes of variant pronunciation characters and the investigation on the revision of variant pronunciation characters in each version of dictionary, we finds that each version of Modern Chinese Dictionary has no clear and unified standards of variant pronunciation characters.Chapter 4 bases on the increase or decrease of variant pronunciation characters, and redefines the scope of modern Chinese variant pronunciation characters in Modern Chinese Dictionary. At the same time, this chapter discusses specific solutions about revising pronunciations of variant pronunciation characters in Modern Chinese Dictionary. We think the most important point is that the dictionary should set single and clear standards of revising and marking pronunciations about variant pronunciation characters,thus in order to promoting the standardization of the language.Chapter 5 is a conclusion which summarizes the full text.