Basics of Chinese Character Studies

Author: Qiyun Zhang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-12-16
Features: Chinese characters are one of the world's ethnic scripts. The two most basic tools of human communication are language and writing. These two communication tools belong to different categories. The essence of language is sound and meaning, expressed and understood through the transmission and reception of vocalized speech. The essence of writing is form, recording the sound and meaning of language through its physical shape. Similarly, as tools of human communication, language is primary, while writing, as a supplementary tool for language, is secondary. The famous Swiss linguist F. de Saussure classified world writing systems into two major categories: phonetic and ideographic. He explicitly pointed out that ideographic writing's "typical example is Chinese characters." Sinology is the study of Chinese characters, defined in the Great Encyclopedia of China (Linguistics and Philology) as "a science that studies the relationship between the form, sound, and meaning of Chinese characters." Language is a sound-meaning symbol with its own systematic nature, and writing, as a symbol for recording language, also has its systematic nature. Chinese characters are a writing system for recording the Chinese language, and the system of this writing system is maintained by its structural rules. Therefore, sinology, in essence, is the study of the form of Chinese characters, or what is called the structural study of Chinese characters. The Shuowen Jiezi, a specialized work on sinology by Xu Shen of the Eastern Han Dynasty, is essentially and centrally about the study of the form of Chinese characters. "Form" is the foundation of textual studies, and this is the most crucial concept we need to emphasize when studying Chinese characters.