A study on the arguments about phoneticism in China’s Modern Era

Abstract

This study is about the arguments about phoneticism in China`s modern Era. In the past, many Chinese intellectuals insisted on abolishing Chinese characters, since they are too difficult for common people to learn, write, and remember. They thought that the difficult Chinese characters caused the downfall of China. Thus, there were several steps of movements for the identity of the written and spoken language. However, Chinese characters are still kept as the only formal letter in China, because it survived through the arguments of repealing Chinese characters. Probably, Chinese characters will not be abolished in the future. However, problematic situations often happen, because Chinese characters are used to transcribe foreign sounds such as phonetic symbols, even though they are ideograms. The most important part of the characters as an ideogram is the meaning, but sometimes the meaning is ignored for the phonetic representation of foreign sounds. Chinese phonetic loans show this situation well.