The medieval Chinese tradition tells us that a given
Chinese character may change its meaning when its
reading is altered slightly. Modern scholars have
sought principles for these changes, and from those
principles have reconstructed a skeletal system of
early Chinese morphology – with such elements as
derivation by tone change, causative infixes,
transitivising prefixes, etc. Yet it is an arresting
fact that some of pre-modern China's linguistically
most astute scholars inveighed against the multiple
readings on which this research is based. They seem
to have held strong opinions, not always made
explicit, about precisely how it is that Chinese
characters represent language. These two views,
modern and traditional, represent fundamentally
different models of how early Chinese evolved into
modern Chinese.