著者

石野 好一 Ishino Koichi

出版者

新潟大学大学院現代社会文化研究科「言語の普遍性と個別性」プロジェクト

雑誌

言語の普遍性と個別性 (ISSN:1884863X)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.8, pp.15-39, 2017-03

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The aim of this paper is to explain the use of Chinese characters in Japanese. Thisexplanation differs from the explanations made by other linguists. Until now some have proposed that a Chinese character and its reading have the same meaning, but from the point of view of the use of language this hypothesis is not plausible. The Japanese have borrowed the Chinese characters and believe that a Chinese character has its own innate meaning. A character in Japanese often has a few readings and we often find that thesereadings have different meanings. On the other hand a reading often corresponds to a few characters and these characters resemble each other but are not the same in meaning. Therefore I think that we have to distinguish between the meaning of a Chinese character and the meaning of its reading. This gives us two linguistic signs: 1) consists of a Chinese character and its meaning; 2) consists of a reading of a Chinese character and its meaning. This system can explain many phenomena about the use of Chinese characters.