Research on the Formation of Chinese Characters

Abstract

Lang Feng

Alphabetical writing systems use letters that are closely related to speech to record speech. However, the glyphs of Chinese characters do not directly express sounds, and the ideographic mechanism between the glyphs and their meanings is not transparent. We analysed the relationship between the glyphs and meanings of nine thousand Chinese characters and found that the combination of elements in the glyph constructs certain imagery, and this imagery is a psychological representation of the experience informing the concept of the character, so the meaning and glyph of the characters are ideographically connected. In other words, the formation of Chinese characters is to use a small number of basic components with images to combine with each other to construct different imageries, so that the imagery can metaphor the meaning of the Chinese characters, including polysemy. In order to search for these imageries scientifically we propose four necessary conditions that the imageries sought must meet. We use the many related meanings derived from the configuration to infer the imagery of the configuration, so that this imagery can explain the meanings of the characters. In the end, we found out the imagery and structure these nine thousand Chinese characters, summarized the five combination modes of Chinese characters, and extended these combination modes to multi-character words combining characters and characters. These results reveal the ideographic mechanism of the hierarchical combination of the internal structure of Chinese characters and their imagery, unearth the interpretable imagery and knowledge that directly represent the meaning of Chinese characters, and help propose a guiding theory for character word formation in the Chinese writing system.

PDF