20世纪汉字性质问题研究评述

汉字性质问题关系到对于汉字所处发展阶段的论定 ,这个问题一开始就是在西方文字学关于文字发展三阶段论的框架下来思考的 ,跟 2 0世纪关于汉字评价的争论是联系在一起的。5 0年代以后 ,才开始从文字记写语言中哪个单位层次的角度来看汉字的性质。考察 2 0世纪汉字性质讨论的进展 ,可比较清楚地揭示汉字性质问题的症结所在。

Studies on the Nature of Chinese Characters in the Twentieth Century

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.