Among the research of Chinese Characters, there is a long history of the study of “the six categories of Chinese characters,” also a lot of research achievements have been accumulated from the past. Since the Qing Confucian Dai Zhen put forward the theory of “Four Noumenon and Two Uses,” advocated that the Transformed Cognates and Rebus are as the methods of using characters. The debates have been raised once again among different parties. Among them, the one with the most divergent opinions is the usage of “Transformed Cognates.” At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, Mr. Zhang Taiyan made a theory from the perspective of the migrating of language. “The transformed Cognates, means that a new character created by changing the tone or the rhythm of the original character,” said Zhang. He clearly stated” a new character created,” regarded that “Transformed cognates” as a practice of creating new characters due to the transfers of sound. Which has always been seen as an important promoter of the theory. However, the subsequent researchers who also sat at the feet of Zhang have two different understandings and interpretations of “the method of using the character” and “the method of creating a character”. This article attempts to sort out the relevant discussion of Mr. Taiyan’s theory and restore the background of the time that Zhang made it. Also discussing the different interpretation perspectives of Zhang’s Transformed Cognates Theory by subsequent scholars in Taiwan. Finally, propose the author’s observations and conclusions.

Reflecting some significant differences in the dictionaries on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait through the process of distinguishing and analyzing common four-character idioms, this study mainly discusses the heteromorphic phenomenon of the idioms. The research method is to conduct research on the corpus of ancient and modern materials to understand ancient and modern usage of similar idioms. This study lists out eight groups of common idiom variants as examples. It intends to explore the reasons for the formation of individual vocabulary from the perspective of literary theory supplemented by the data content of the classical literature database and modern corpus to show the ancient documents and the modern people’s language use habit. At the same time, it compares similarities and differences between Taiwan’s Mandarin Dictionary (Revised Edition) and the Chinese Dictionary in Mainland China, comparing once again different aspects of the dictionary compilation and basic language education. It also shows the difference between both sides of the Taiwan Strait in the aspects of idiom variants included in dictionaries and the principle of word inclusion in them.

Since China announced the “Chinese Character Simplification Scheme” in 1956, two sides of the straits have had different usage of Chinese characters, which is Traditional or Simplified. This situation has been there for 60 years and we have noticed that, although simplified characters make it easy to remember and write, some original concepts of the characters, such as Chinese culture or how the character was created, have been lost. As Chinese characters consist of “format”, “sound”, and “meaning”, which are closely connected with one another, simplified Chinese have made it inconsistent with the original Chinese characters as they have become simple lines and symbols. When people are learning Chinese, they are not able to understand the close relationship between the format and the meaning or the rich Chinese culture carried by the character. The research motive is from the trend in the survey of university students about their concepts of the usage of traditional and simplified characters. The research will further explain how the format and the meaning of ancient Chinese characters were closely connected.