Between 1936 and 1940, Herrlee G. Creel and Peter A. Boodberg engaged in what has come to be seen as a celebrated debate over the nature of Chinese writing. Creel characterized this writing as fundamentally “ideographic.” Boodberg, for his part, objected that by definition writing represents speech, and therefore all writing—very much including Chinese writing—must be fundamentally phonetic. Seventy-five years have passed since Boodberg’s second essay was published. Although a number of influential Western scholars—especially those with an interest in linguistics—have pronounced his to be the final word on the topic, the history of Chinese writing is sufficiently rich to stimulate renewed discussion and perhaps also new ideas (or at least restatements of old ideas). In this essay, I suggest that not only can the category of Chinese characters termed semantographs have an ideographic basis, but the same is true as well for a sizable percentage of phonograms.

The emergence and spread of the variant form of Chinese Character are related to people’s cognitive principles. The cognitive modes of Chinese Character formed by identity, assimilation, distinction and integration. On the surface, the variant form of Chinese Character appears haphazardly. It is clearly seen that there are the reason on the evolution of the variant form of the Chinese Character, which mainly lies in the active role of human perception. People’s cognitive principles determine not only the ways of the emergence but the degree of variation of the variant form of Chinese Character.

The paper carries out a systematic survey on the origins, evolution, formation module of 201 radicals of Chinese characters by means of database analysis method. On the basis of the above investigation, the research probes into the relation between 201 radicals and HSK 2905 from the aspects of Ziwei (overlapping percentage), character-formation frequency, positions and functions. With the help of the psychological theory, the methods of learning radicals are provided for reference.

At present, Characters Collection in Chu Area（《楚文字編》） (called CWZB in later content) is not only just an important ancient writing dictionary, but also a high-level academic bookmaking because of its appropriate stylistic rules and layout，abundant contents and easiness to use. However, any academic achievements have historical limitations. After CWZB came out, it had been revealed a lot of defects from the perspective of current situation and the status of unearthed study of Chu literature. The main disadvantage is missing graphemes from Bamboo Manuscripts Deposited in Shanghai Museum (《上海博物館藏戰國楚竹書》 (called SBJ in later context)). SBJ is the most important written material after Bamboo slips from Guodian Tomb（《郭店楚墓竹簡》）. SBJ is published in succession since 2001.The total number of characters are up to 20000.Obviously overall presents about Characters collection in Chu area will not be intact if Characters from SBJ are not embodied. We concluded about 900 newly-supplemented characters with SBJ making up CWZB. Those newly-supplemented Characters show the following research significances: 1) bringing forward existence of some Characters; 2) enriching meanings of some characters with the reference of new manusciptionmanuscripts; 3) amending some errors in CWZB with the reference of newly-supplement Characters; 4) numerous newly-supplemented characters show their corresponding relations between themselves in Chu area.

In this paper, the identification theory based on characteristics of the inner pages is presented for the first time. This theory cannot be ignored in the identification of Naxi manuscripts. The identification theory based on characteristics on the inner pages is divided into identification based on inner page format, identification based on illustrations, identification based on frame and identification based on initials and separators. The rationality of identification theory based on characteristics on the inner pages is confirmed through demonstrations. At last, principles, rules and limitations of identification based on characteristics on the inner pages are summarized. The advantage of this theory is simple and effective, and the disadvantage is too dependent on scriptures inside pages of the style and color.