earticle

영어

This paper's purpose is twofold. First, it will show the limit and the problems of the surveys conducted on modern Chinese dialects. Second, it will suggest an alternative and more wholesome approach. The hypothesis that all the modern Chinese dialects have developed from the ancient or old Chinese overemphasizes only one aspect -- phonological characteristics. As a result, surveys based on this hypothesis either fail to consider or ignore other linguistic features such as the lexicon or grammatical characteristics of each dialect. This paper would like to suggest that we can overcome this fallacy by embracing various dialect dictionaries and local gazetteers as complementary resources.