Date of Award

1-1-2001

Thesis Type

Masters

Document Type

Thesis

Divisions

Faculty of Languages and Linguistics

Department

-

Institution

Universiti Malaya

Abstract

Chinese characters evolve from ideographic writing. They in fact originated from ancient pictographics. According to Liu Shu, an ancient document on Chinese characters, Chinese characters can be divided into six categories, namely, imitative drafts, indicative symbols, logical aggregates, phonetic complexes, false borrowing and mutually explanatory. Of these six types of Chinese characters, the phonetic complexes category is the most significant. This form of characters is made up of two main components, namely, the radical component and the phonetic series component. This group of Chinese characters makes up over ninety percent or about sixty thousand words of the entire corpus of Chinese characters. The phonetic complexes category incorporates the writing form, the phonetic as well as semantic elements. Generally, the phonetic series component shares a common semantic element. This is called the "hidden semantic". For example: phonetic series shares a common semantic element "a little" with the primary meaning of (shallow/a little of water), (a little of gold/money), (a little money)". Furthermore, the phonetic series component also shares a common phonetic clement called the "pronunciation determiner". For example : the phonetic series shares a common phonetic element [ian] with [qian], [qian], [jian]". However, this is not always the case. This study attempts to establish the extent of the "hidden semantic" and the "pronunciation determiner" present in the [ing] phonetic series. Two hundred and twenty five words of phonetic series [ing] were selected for the study. They were analysed from two aspects : "pronunciation deterniner" and "hidden semantic". With regard to the former, the words were divided into four groups. They arc " Consonant similarity, vowel and tone", "Consonant and Vowel similarity only", "Vowel similarity only" and "Similarity in phonetic series but different phonetic". AA for "hidden semantic", the words were divided into thirty group, based on the phonetic series in Liu Shu. The findings are as follows : In relation to "pronunciation deteminer", of the 243 words, 60.5% is found lo belong to the "Consonant similarity, vowel and tone" category, 16.5% "Consonant and vowel similarity only" category, 12.3% "Vowel similarity only" category and 10.7% "Similarity in phonetic series but different phonetic" category. As for "hidden semantics", the phonetic series has the hidden meaning of [obstacles], the "T" phonetic series of [hard], the phonetic series, of [straight], the phonetic series of [strong], the phonetic series of [light], the phonetic series of [sound], the phonetic series of [not round], the phonetic series of[disorder], the "X" phonetic series of [dark), the phonetic series of [flat], the phonetic series of [clear], the phonetic series of [sound], the phonetic series of [surrounded] and the phonetic series of [circumlocutory].

Initial

snms

Additional Information

Dissertation (M.A) -- Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, 2001.

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