Abstract:

The study of the nature of Chinese characters has a close relation to the understanding of the present stage of evolving Chinese characters. The issue, from the very beginning, tended to be discussed within a framework of the Western theory about the three-stage evolution of a writing system, and continued along with various evaluations of Chinese characters throughout the twentieth century. It was only after the 1950s that the nature of Chinese characters was understood from the angle of linguistic units that writings copied.

Key words: nature of Chinese character, review of centenary studies, theory about the three-stage evolution of a writing system, ideographic writing, phonetic writing, morphological writing