Levels of Phonological Regularity in the Chinese Writing System

Abstract

The phonetic aspect of the Chinese written language is an area of Sinology that has been investigated by a number of scholars, both Chinese and Western. Most early researches have been concerned with (1) the historical development of phonetic compound characters and (2) the organization of these characters into series according to their common phon.etic elements. Chinese scholars such as Xu Shen and later Chinese philologists, as well as Western scholars such as Chalmers (1911), Soothill (1911), and Wieger (1927) have contributed substantially to our knowledge . of phonetic compounds and the role they play in the Chinese writing system. Bernhard Karlgren (1923) has made use of phonetic series in his reconstructions of Ancient and Archaic Chinese, and has made a number of statements regarding the phonological changes which phonetic compounds have undergone in various stages of the language.