A Study On The Homologous Words In The End - Group Of "Guangyun Sound System"

Western etymology can only be researched by Comparison method. Different with that, we can also use the Chinese character glyph to research Chinese etymology. Pictophmetic characters dominant in Chinese characters. Pictophmetic character’s phonetic component is also the hint of the etymological meaning. So it is important in Chinese etymology research. The paper takes the characters in Kuang-Yun Sheng-His whose initial consonants belong to Duan as objects and uses both Shen Jianshi’s etymologic theory and contemporary theory integrated. Finally it concluded 275 cognates (Include some variant Chinese characters and some characters out of Kuang-Yiin Sheng-His)On that bases, the thesis comes to the conclusion about the phonetic component of a Chinese character in etymology such as:1. The semantic category of etymology is recorded by sound. Phonetic element can be the hint of etymological meaning, because it has the phonetic function. The meaning and pronunciation of phonetic element correspond with etymology. Character pattern is the tip to combine the word family.2. The phonetic components of Chinese characters have gradability. Though they have different written forms in different layers, but because of the same pronunciation, they can represent the same etymology. It proves that no matter what the written forms are, if pronunciations are similar, different written form phonetic components may record the same etymology. The scope of word family can be expanded through meaning and pronunciation not being restricted to the character form. Two methods (phonetic components of pictophmetic characters’written forms and characters’meaning and pronunciation) both can be used to research etymology. In fact, they are not contradictory, but complementary each other.3. The meaning of phonetic component contains two layers. One is the Chinese script layer and the other one is etymology. The two sides should be differentiated, so that we could distinguish Youwen (A view that pictophmetic character’s right-side compound which usually suggests the character’s sound also suggests the meaning) from xingsheng and huiyi (The characters has two graphic components whose semantic category and sound are suggested by the same component.) Only through that way, the answers of questions can be found out such as why some phonetic elements represent original meaning, but others represent borrowed meaning? Why the members of word family have the same semantic category, but their common phonetic components of pictophmetic characters do not have that?...