從漢語漢字的特性談臺語用字的問題

The Problem of Word-using in Taiwanese Languages as Viewed from the Perspective of the Characteristics of Han-Chinese Language

臧汀生(Zang, Ting-sheng)

《國文學誌》 4期 (2000/12) Pp. 135-146

https://doi.org/10.6973/CJ.200012.0135

摘要

文字乃應表記語言的需要而製作，其文字的設計自然必須因應該語言的特質，而無所謂高下之分。漢語既屬單音表義的孤立語(Solitary Language)，則其文字設計當然只須採取獨體，而不必如多音節屈折語(Inflectional Language)的西洋語言一般，採用許多經過省異的字母加以組合。甚至我們可以說，孤立語的漢語，由於數義共用一音，以至於同音字過多而依賴聲調區別意義的現象，也絕對不容許其使用純粹表音的字母做為文字；因此，純粹表義；或同時兼表音義的獨體漢字便成為漢語用字的唯一選擇。中國共產黨建政初期大力推動拼音文字，後來卻不得不走回簡化漢字的原因正在於此。而漢字的發展歷史也證明漢字並非一成不變，更非神聖不可侵犯，只要不違背漢字的結構原理，因時因地制宜地變化舊字，自創新字應該都是合理的。台灣語言屬於漢語的支系，當然大部分語言都可以尋得對應的漢字；可是因為歷史因素，卻也有些已經失去對應或無法對應，而必須依漢字原理另行造字，或約定用字，如此才能一方面與本地其他語系的人互相聯繫，並同時保存自己的語言特質。

關鍵字

孤立語 ； 獨體漢字 ； 台灣語

並列摘要

The creation of characters is mainly for the purpose of presenting and recording of oral language. Thus, the different designs of characters should naturally conform to the special characteristic of the relevant oral language. Accordingly, there is no such design that is absolutely good or bad. Han Chinese belongs to the family of solitary language and thus its design naturally is in the form of a single character. It is different from the Western languages that belong to the inflectional language and has to combine different alphabets to create a word. As the solitary language allows one sound representing different meanings, the employment of different tones becomes necessary to differentiate different meanings. This special phenomena does not allow the using of alphabet to create a word (character). Therefore, the single characters which signifies meaning or signifies meaning and sounds at the same time seems to be only choice for Han Chinese. This explains for the fact that the Chinese communist party tried in vain in romanizing Chinese characters and finally gave way to the simplified characters. The history of the development of Han Chinese characters witnessed changes. If one follows the structural principle of Han Chinese characters and makes changes to old characters to suit the needs of different places and times, it is reasonable to create new characters. Taiwanese languages belong to the sub-branch of the larger family of Han Chinese languages and thus one can find out the relevant Chinese characters for most words in Taiwanese languages. However, due to historical reasons, some words eventually lost their counterparts in the vast pool of Chinese characters . It is therefore. necessary to create new characters according to the principle found in Han Chinese or use new characters according to convention. In doing so, one can communicate with local people using different dialects on the one hand while keeping one's own linguistic characteristic on the other.