Research On The Ideographic Expression Of Chinese Character

As the writing—symbol of Chinese, Chinese character is the only independently original character with thousands of years. Picture is the mother form of Chinese character, so study the ancient Chinese character, we can figure out the object. In Han Dynasty, Xushen wrote Shuowen jiezi, which is the first book on the study of Chinese character. Figuring out the meaning from the character’s font is the essence of this book. In the following two thousand years, the scholars’study on Chinese character was around Xushen’s perspective.In the twentieth century, with the rising of the compared philology, in the comparasion of the different nations’characters, the quality of Chinese character was put forward and soon became one of the hot topics. The Swiss scholar Saussure holds the idea that Chinese character is the kind of ideogram. Many latter researchers approve Saussure’s view, and they regard Chinese character as an ideogram. At the same time, other researchers don’t agree with Saussure’s view, they come up with many different ideas around the quality of Chinese character, such as, phonography, ideo-phonographic character and so on. Is Chinese character a kind of ideogram? Why there are so many different views in answering the question of the quality of Chinese character? This paper is written to explain this phenomenon.The mean idea of the paper is to demonstrate that the Chinese character is an ideogram. Based on the traditional study method, the paper combines the synchronic study and diachronic study together in discussing the quality of Chinese character. In this paper, the Chinese characters are divided into two categories, which are linguistics and language.The paper discovers that both the ancient Chinese character and the modern Chinese character are ideogram. The distinction of the two kinds of Chinese character is the way they show their meanings. Compared to other kinds of characters, showing meaning is the outstanding factor of Chinese character.The complication of Chinese character and Chinese language and their varieties in the long history determine that the recognitions to Chinese characters are different. However, among the different kinds of recognitions, ideogram is the only one that takes the consideration of the history of Chinese character, the analysis of the font of Chinese character, and the writing function of Chinese character to Chinese vocabulary. That means showing meaning is the distinctive character of Chinese character, and it is the essence of Chinese character.Faced with the different views, the paper discusses both the advantages and the disadvantages of them. And then, the paper studies the whole Chinese character from different perspectives. At last, it draws conclusion that Chinese character is a kind of ideogram.The innovation of the paper is that it introduces two conceptions that are the stored Chinese character and the communicated Chinese character. In this paper, the author also makes efforts to introduce other ideas, like the natural motivation and the man-made motivation on the formation of Chinese character. To conclude, on the one hand, the paper is built on the former related achievements, on the other hand, the paper absorbs the new thoughts of the author. In the paper, the author draws the conclusion that the Chinese character is a kind of ideogram.