The Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Heterographs

As for heterographs, they have been studied since 1960's by scholars in this field. Mr. Yin Huanxian is the first one to write article"Discussion on the Criterion of Words'Written Forms"and then it is published in the famous publication"Chinese". After the publishing of the article, for decades, a great many articles are published and ardent discussions involved in are holden. These articles mainly refer to the subject character of sorting out heterographs, the definition of heterographs, the classifying of heterographs as well as the way and principles of heterographs'criterion. In English lexicon studies, there are few researches on English heterographs relatively. The classification research of heterographs is referred to in some lexicon literatures. For example, the differences between British English and American English; different writing forms of loanwords in English, etc. In their researches, the scholars classified the heterographs into the category of lexicon or classified them into the category of character. All of them hold the point of view of dividing language and characters into two parts. They divided the relation between language and characters and dealt with them separately. This dissertation takes relation and methodology as jumping-off place, and takes the point of view of combining language and characters as a whole. This dissertation treats language and characters as a complementary and relative item, and starts from the way of relationship between language and character to observe and analyse the differences of heterographs in these two languages, as well as the root of differences.This dissertation is divided into six parts, and the main idea of every part is as follow:The introduction is the summarization of the situation of heterograph's study these years. Chapter one gives the new definition and new classification of heterographs on the basis of other scholars'research fruit. The definition we make for heterographs is that heterograph is the different writing forms of a same word with the same meaning. This dissertation divides Chinese and English heterographs into several different conditions——heterographs with same sound, dialectal heterographs, loanword heterographs. There is also a special kind in Chinese called yixu heterographs, which are in the same word element but different order in it. Summing up other scholars'research fruit, this dissertation develops a new understanding about heterographs. Chapter two is the concrete definition and description on each kind of heterographs in Chinese. On the basis of analyzing materials this dissertation classifies four kinds of heterographs. Chapter three displays the facts of English heterographs, using the material to analyze and describe the situation of English heterographs. In chapter five we gave exact statistics of every item in both Chinese and English heterograph to display the differences between the two kinds of heterographs. The dissertation uses the way of relationship between language and characters as well as the polestar of taking language and character as an inseparatible item to dig out the root of the differences. It is considered that the difference of the relationship between the two kinds of language and character is the cause of the discrepancies of the two kinds of language-character relationship. The last part is the summary of the whole dissertation, and put forward a way to study Chinese and western languages and characters.In this dissertation, the author puts Chinese and English heterographs in the background of Chinese and English and gives them new definitions and classifications. Using a new concept and idea——comprehensive concept, standing on the relationship of language and characters, starting to analyze the fact of language and characters, according to the studying way of taking language and characters as a whole, this dissertation digs out the deep reason for the differences of Chinese and English heterographs. The innovation of this dissertation is filling up the vacancy of comparative study on Chinese and English heterographs, and finding out the root of differences between Chinese and English heterographs.