For the paper "Talking about the Characteristics of Chinese Characters with Examples"

Chinese characters have six characteristics, some of which are advantages and some are disadvantages.

(1) Chinese characters are basically adapted to Chinese.

The reason why Chinese characters adapt to Chinese is mainly because the monosyllabic form of Chinese characters is consistent with that of Chinese morphemes, and there is often a corresponding relationship between recorded Chinese morphemes and Chinese characters. Chinese characters are basically compatible with Chinese, which can be understood from the following aspects:

First, a Chinese character represents a syllable, and a morpheme is basically a syllable, so Chinese characters and morphemes are corresponding, so it is very appropriate to record Chinese morphemes with Chinese characters. However, the correspondence between Chinese characters and morphemes does not mean that Chinese characters and morphemes are equivalent. Careful analysis shows that the relationship between Chinese characters and morphemes is actually more complicated. After all, Chinese characters are writing units and morphemes are language units. The complex relationship between Chinese characters and morphemes is that a Chinese character may represent several different morphemes, such as "meter" for meters, meters for length units, and "station" for "station" or its meaning. It is also possible that several Chinese characters represent a morpheme. For example, loanwords such as "sofa, guitar and Malaysia" are transliterated in Chinese characters under the influence of the pronunciation of loanwords, and Chinese characters have no independent meaning, so such words can be ignored. In China tradition, some conjunctions record a morpheme in several Chinese characters, such as "Slim, Swing, Pipa, Spider, Hesitation". Of course, most Chinese characters use a Chinese character to express a morpheme, such as "Mountain, River, Lamp, Man, Look" and so on.

Second, Chinese is a language without morphological changes. Grammatical meaning and grammatical relationship are mainly expressed by word order and function words, not by phonemes as in Indo-European languages. Therefore, the characteristics of Chinese determine that it is more appropriate to record with Chinese characters. For example, the English verb do (da) has morphological changes such as do, did and done. The form of a word (especially a verb) is different in different sentences, and its phoneme needs to be changed. It is more appropriate to record such a language with phonemes, while the similar meanings of verbs are expressed by independent morphemes (words) such as "Zheng, Zeng and Ji" in Chinese. For another example, in English, plural numbers are represented by the suffix S after nouns, and this morpheme is also represented by adding phonemes (that is, internal inflections) inside words, while in Chinese, plural numbers are represented by adding a morpheme "men", and non-ideographic nouns are mainly represented by the previous quantifiers, rather than changing inside words. It is very convenient to express this situation with an independent Chinese character, and it will be difficult to express the morphological changes like English with Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are suitable for Chinese, and borrowing Chinese characters can disprove the situation of Korean and Japanese. Japan and South Korea used to use Chinese characters to record their own languages. However, due to the great differences in grammatical rules between the two languages and Chinese, Chinese characters can only record fixed parts, and for the parts with morphological changes, Chinese characters with fixed writing methods cannot be decomposed. Therefore, it is not entirely appropriate to record Japanese and Korean in Chinese characters, and letters are needed to represent the parts with morphological changes. Because of this, North Korea created proverbs on the basis of Chinese characters, and so did Japan. Moreover, in history, Chinese characters have also been borrowed by neighboring ethnic minorities, but they have not been directly borrowed to record their own national languages. But on the basis of them, they have been transformed to meet the needs of their own national languages, such as Qidan, Xixia and Jurchen.

Thirdly, recording Chinese with Chinese characters can distinguish homophones very effectively. Chinese syllable structure is simple, with only about 400 syllables for consonants and vowels, and only 1, more than 200 syllables for vowels and tones. In addition, the word form is short, mainly disyllabic words, and monosyllabic words are still very active, which can be said to be the basis of Chinese vocabulary, so there are many homophones and homophones, which are easy to be confused, and different forms of Chinese characters play a role in distinguishing homophones, so there are many homophones in Chinese. In writing, homonyms are subtly distinguished, which pinyin characters can't do, such as "formula-commerce-attack-palace-fortifications", "form-situation-action", "country-country-national conditions" and "mid-period-end period". In spoken language, homophones are identical in pronunciation, which is easy to be confused. However, if we look at several groups of Chinese characters with identical pronunciation but different glyphs, it will be clear at a glance that the role of Chinese characters in distinguishing homophones:

Habitat (level tone): perching, bowing, catching, being cut, gangrene, foal, hair, squatting, squatting, squatting.

Stone (silent): yes, city, style, event, demonstration, prospect, world, situation, suitability, examination, room, erosion, oath, death, persimmon.

Li (voiceless): Li, Li, Li, Zhou, for example, Li, Li, Li, Li, Li, Li, Li, Li, Li, Li, Li, Li, Li, Li.

Iraq (voiceless): Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.

Each of the above four groups of Chinese characters has exactly the same phonology and tone, but the fonts are quite different, which brings great convenience to distinguish different morphemes. Mr. Wang, a famous linguist in China, used this distinctive function of Chinese characters to write a story about the history of eating lions in Chinese characters with exactly the same sound and rhyme, and copied it here for everyone to enjoy:

Lion lover Shishi Shishi vowed to eat ten lions. Shi always sees lions in the market. At ten o'clock, ten lions are suitable for the market. Shishi is in the right market at the right time. Stone regards it as ten lions, relying on the vector potential to make its ten lions immortal. Stone picks up the bodies of ten lions, which is just right for stone chambers. The stone room is wet, and the stone room is waiting to be cleaned. Wipe the stone room and taste the ten lion corpses for the first time. When I was eating, the first thing I knew was the bodies of ten lions, but they were actually the bodies of ten lions. Trial interpretation is a problem.

If these morphemes are recorded in Pinyin, and according to the rules of Pinyin, morphemes with the same pronunciation should also have the same glyph, then these morphemes cannot be distinguished from the glyph at all. Chinese characters developed from ancient ideographic characters to pictophonetic characters. Why didn't they step into the ranks of phonetic characters? This is related to the function of distinguishing homonyms effectively, and it is also an important reason why many people oppose the reform and pinyin of Chinese characters. Indeed, at present, pinyin can't solve the problem of Chinese homophones.

Fourth, there are many dialects in modern Chinese, and their pronunciations vary greatly. However, due to the outstanding consistency of the speech law system and vocabulary system of all parties, recording Chinese in Chinese characters plays a role in communicating dialects. Although the pronunciation of the same word varies from place to place, most of them are recorded in the same Chinese character, and everyone can see it clearly. Therefore, Chinese characters play a very good role in communicating dialects, and pinyin characters are difficult to adapt to the characteristics of Chinese dialect differences. Chinese characters have made great contributions to maintaining the unity of Chinese and avoiding the division of Chinese into different languages. In Europe, many different languages are far less different from each other than Chinese dialects, but they are different languages. Although there are great differences, dialects in different parts of China are not further divided, and because of the maintenance of Chinese characters, no one will think that dialects in China are different languages, although some western linguists regard some dialects in China as different languages (see Hartman and Stoke's Linguistics and Linguistics Dictionary).

(2) Chinese characters are the unity of form, sound and meaning.

Because Chinese characters record morphemes, morphemes are the unity of sound and meaning, and each morpheme has both sound and meaning, plus the shape of Chinese characters, so Chinese characters are the unity of shape, sound and meaning. A Chinese character can represent several morphemes and syllables, but each Chinese character must independently represent a syllable and a morpheme and be tangible. Therefore, Chinese characters are the trinity of form, sound and meaning, which are inseparable. This is very different from phoneme characters and syllable characters, such as English letters A, B, C, D, E and Japanese letters ぁ, ぁ, ぅ, ぇ, ぉ, etc. They have form and their own pronunciation, but they are meaningless, so they are not the unity of form, sound and meaning, because they

It is precisely because of this feature that it is difficult for us to learn Chinese characters at first, but after learning a certain number of Chinese characters, it is not difficult to learn words. For example, when we learn the word "electricity", we can form "telephone, electric light, wire, TV, movie, current, motor, electric meter and electricity" with other meaningful Chinese characters, so we basically don't have to learn and memorize these new words. Because we learn Chinese characters one by one, it is actually equivalent to learning morphemes of word formation one by one, and mastering the shape, sound and meaning of these word formation components, then it is naturally easy to learn and understand these words. On the other hand, phonemes are very easy for people to learn words. For example, English has only 26 letters and can be learned in a few classes. Japanese has 50 phonetic symbols, which is easy for beginners, but it is more difficult when learning words, because each word has a different spelling form and is not easy to remember.

(3) Chinese characters have strong permanence.

The transcendence of Chinese characters can be understood from two aspects: one is the strong consistency between ancient and modern times, and the other is the special function of communicating dialects. The transcendence of Chinese characters lies in their accessibility from ancient times to modern times. Today, we still know the Chinese characters in the literature thousands of years ago. What we can't understand is not the Chinese characters themselves, but the changes of morpheme meanings in ancient and modern times. Although Chinese characters have a history of thousands of years, the structural patterns and systems of ancient and modern Chinese characters are essentially the same, and the corresponding relationship with the basic units in the language is the same, that is, they are all recorded morphemes (and words at the same time in ancient times) without essential changes, so they have a special role throughout ancient and modern times. For example, the novels of the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties in the history of China are not difficult to read today, while the contemporary literature recorded in Pinyin is difficult for ordinary people to understand today, and only experts can understand it, because Pinyin has to adjust its spelling with the change of the pronunciation of words (of course, it is not absolutely consistent, for example, the k in the English word know is not pronounced today, but its spelling has not been adjusted).

The hyperspace feature of Chinese characters is that it has a special function of communicating dialects. Chinese dialects are complicated, and there are seven dialects. If you subdivide it, there will be more dialects, and the differences between dialects are particularly large. Verbally, people in different dialect areas can't speak at all. If they talk, it's like talking to foreigners, and they don't understand each other. Unless they use an intermediary language (such as Mandarin), they can't communicate. However, writing in Chinese characters is a very wonderful situation: whether you are from Shanghai, Guangdong, Hunan or Fujian, there is no obstacle between you. Without Chinese characters, it is hard to imagine how to communicate between different dialects! Of course, the fundamental role of Chinese characters in communicating dialects is that Chinese characters record Chinese. Although there are many Chinese dialects, the grammatical features (words and sentences) of each dialect are the same, and the differences in morpheme meanings are very small. Otherwise, it is also incomprehensible. Japanese recorded in Chinese characters, although you know every word, can't understand its content. Some people exaggerate that people who learn Japanese often "laugh in and cry out", which is the reason, but learning Chinese dialects will not be like this.

From the above analysis, we can see that the study of Chinese characters requires us to understand the eternal function of Chinese characters. We should also note that the root of this feature of Chinese characters is the * * * connectivity between China's ancient and modern grammar and vocabulary system and Fiona Fang. The function of Chinese characters to communicate ancient and modern dialects is actually a reflection that Chinese characters basically adapt to Chinese.

(4) There are a large number of Chinese characters, which are complicated in structure and lack of a complete phonetic system.

The number of words in the Chinese character system is amazing. Since ancient times, the total number of Chinese characters has reached more than 80 thousand. According to statistics, the number of Chinese characters used in modern Chinese is about 1000. The National Modern Chinese General Character List contains 7000 Chinese characters and the Modern Chinese General Character List contains 3500 Chinese characters.

The huge number of Chinese characters is rooted in the characteristics of Chinese. Because the syllable structure of Chinese is relatively simple, the number of syllables is relatively small, which is out of proportion to the number of morphemes in the language. For example, there are only about 400 basic syllables composed of consonants and vowels in modern Chinese, and only about 1 200 with four tones, while there are thousands of morphemes in the vocabulary system of modern Chinese. In this case, there are many morphemes with the same pronunciation, and the word form is short, mainly two syllables, but because of this, there are also many and often commonly used words. If we don't use different forms of Chinese characters to distinguish these homophones and words in writing, it will cause confusion, confusion in use, affect communication and interpersonal communication, and even lead to misunderstanding and loss. From the differentiation process of some Chinese characters, we can see the role of Chinese characters in distinguishing word meanings. For example, the original meaning of "cloud" is the cloud of clouds. Later, the meaning of "say" was added. In order to distinguish it, a "cloud" was built to distinguish it. "dustpan" originally meant dustpan, but later it meant the third person, so people added a bamboo prefix in the yard to form a "dustpan"; "Mo" means that the sun is submerged in the grass from the configuration, indicating dusk in the evening. Later, the negative meaning was extended, indicating that there was no one. In order to distinguish, a "day" is added to the original font to distinguish. This is the word "dusk". There are many similar examples, such as "confused marriage", "natural burning", "toe amputation", "picky" and "profit overflow" and so on. It can be seen that the number of Chinese characters is complex, which is not easy to learn and master, but also has its own easy to distinguish.

The structure of Chinese characters is complex, which can be seen from several aspects. On the one hand, Chinese characters have many strokes. Taking 7,000 commonly used Chinese characters as an example, the strokes range from 7 to 15, with more than 5,000 strokes, and the largest number of strokes in a Chinese character is as many as 36. On the other hand, whether the strokes and components of Chinese character structural units are arranged and combined in a unified direction, but scattered in all directions from top to bottom, left and right, marching in many directions, which has the characteristics of plane, and the combination methods of structural units are also varied. There are separation, connection and intersection between strokes, and there are combinations of left and right structures, up and down structures, enclosing structures and frame structures between components, and many of them are often the sum of several ways, so the structure is more complicated. Chinese characters and pinyin characters travel in different directions. Therefore, learning Chinese characters, only know the composition of strokes, do not know the structure, or can not write a word.

And there is no phonetic component in the structure of Chinese characters. Although there are a large number of pictophonetic characters in the Chinese character system, the notes of pictophonetic characters are not special phonetic symbols, and many of them are independent characters. More importantly, most of the notes of pictophonetic characters in modern Chinese characters have lost their phonetic functions. Some notes can express sound with one word, but not with another word. It is difficult to judge these situations together. For example, according to the phonetic situation of modern pictophonetic notes, "Taiwan Province" may make mistakes if he uses notes to infer the pronunciation of an unknown word. When people use Chinese characters, they often have an illusion that since Chinese characters are juxtaposed, they can infer pronunciation with their own notes, which often leads to mistakes and jokes. For example, the mispronunciation of the following Chinese character is the result of people's blind inference with notes: "Yi, Yu, Kan, caries, tooth, yeast, stem, leaf, addiction". People often say that Chinese characters are difficult to read, which is related to the fact that Chinese characters cannot express sounds structurally.

(5) It is difficult to use Chinese characters for machining and information processing.

Chinese characters are difficult to be used in mechanization and information processing, which can be understood from the following aspects. First of all, the number of Chinese characters is huge, and there are 7000 commonly used words in modern Chinese. If there are more Chinese characters used in the professional field, it will certainly be more difficult to process so many Chinese characters mechanically. Secondly, the structure of Chinese characters is complex, and most of the strokes are around 10, and there are dozens of them. Moreover, the pattern of strokes and component combinations of Chinese characters is also very complicated. We can classify the combination patterns of these Chinese characters with people, but through word-by-word observation and comparison, it can be said that they are word-by-word structural patterns. For some words, such as "Dong, Musk and Qi", there is no obstacle to mechanical processing because of the limited number of phonemes in pinyin. For example, the citation has only 26 Latin letters, only 52 capital letters, and other characters (such as punctuation marks, etc. ), so the total does not exceed 65,438+000. Therefore, all English characters can be put on the keyboard, and it is unthinkable to copy 7000 Chinese characters on the keyboard. Therefore, in our country, typing has become a technology and needs special study.

We can make a comparison between English and Chinese characters, and this difference can be seen. At present, computers generally use dot matrix to represent text information, that is, an electronic square matrix is used to represent a character. Each square has several grids, and the strokes in the grids are lit and each stroke is dimmed, thus realizing the display of words. To display English, at least 7×9 dots should be used to represent a character (generally 9× 12 dots), and at least 16× 16 dots should be used to represent a character (generally 24×24 dots). English characters 100, Chinese characters are only 7000. So the point is:

English: 7×9× 100=6300.

Chinese characters:16×16× 7000 =1792000 points.

The storage space of Chinese characters in computer is 284 times that of English. The gap is staggering. The mechanized processing of Chinese characters has lagged behind other characters before, because 7000 Chinese characters need to store 1750k bits, while English is less than 10k bits. At the beginning of computer development, there was no such large memory at all. According to the data, the most advanced electronic computer produced by IBM in the United States in the late 1960s has a memory of 4096- 13 1072, which can load Chinese characters, but the price is too high to be put on the market, while other computers cannot load Chinese characters. This is still an ordinary Chinese character lattice. If it is an accurate Chinese character lattice, such as 32×32 dots, or 100× 100 dots, the space occupied by processing 10000 characters is even more amazing. Of course, with the rapid expansion of computer storage today, this problem has been successfully solved, but compared with Latin letters, the limitations of Chinese characters are still obvious, so some scholars believe that in the long run, only Pinyin can facilitate information processing.

(6) It is difficult to use Chinese characters in international cultural exchanges.

Chinese characters are difficult to use in international communication, for one thing, their structure is complicated, and for another, they are difficult to learn and use because they don't express sounds, while Latin letters are widely used in the world, which can be said to be international characters. Comparatively speaking, Chinese characters are very lonely. Although with the development of China's economy and culture and the improvement of China's position in the world, more and more people will learn and use Chinese characters, and even study them, which is different from the internationalization of Chinese characters. So some people say that Chinese characters are international characters, and 2 1 century is the era of Chinese characters. From the perspective of loving Chinese characters and China culture, it is understandable, but from the perspective of scientific and realistic attitude, Chinese characters have their limitations as a tool for international communication.

Chinese characters have a history of thousands of years. The fundamental reason why they can be used for such a long time is to adapt to the characteristics of Chinese. So when we study and study Chinese characters, we should not only see the advantages of Chinese characters, but also see the disadvantages of Chinese characters. We are not arrogant or impetuous when dealing with Chinese characters.