Taboo is an ancient custom in China. The taboo system was applied to the names of emperors had a long history in China. Beginning from Zhou Dynasty, until to Qing Dynasty. It is true that taboo system has caused confusion of the recording of ancient Chinese books and inconvenience to the study of historical materials, but one will be able to apply its principle to appraise the authenticity of those books and materials of one has a good grasp of it. Taboo studies also have a long history. According to Chen Yuan’s陳垣 Shi hui ju li史諱舉例，there are different ways to avoid the forbidden words, such as change the character, blank character, omit a stroke, change the pronunciation, etc. This paper claimed that besides change the forbidden word to a synonym, other ways to achieve taboos were occurred in Han Dynasty, such as “missing one stroke of a Chinese character”, “change the formation of a Chinese character”, “change the shape of a Chinese character”, etc. That means the old conclusion of Chen Yuan and other scholars may be not true. However, philologists argued that those changes are the result of the variant form of a Chinese character異體字. Scholars stated that the way to avoid a tabooed word in Han dynasty was to change the forbidden word to a synonym. In this paper, according to Louji’s 婁機 Hanliziyuan漢隸字源, Hongkuo’s洪适 Lishi隸釋, Zhou Guangye’s周廣業 Jing shi bi ming hui kao經史避名彙考, we examine the relationship between tabooed character and variant form of a Chinese character. Finally, discuss the importance of variant form of a Chinese character in the aspect of taboo studies.

漢字是漢字文化圈中中日韓越四國語文的表述文字，歐西語文則主要由拉丁字母組合而成。 由於種種原因，過往以拉丁字母表述漢字的情況並非罕見。然而在東西文化交流與全球一體化的過程中，亦曾出現過一些以漢字或漢字元素表述西方語文的理論和著作。本文選取了其中部分著作，按其內容分成「語音譯寫」與「同源再生」兩個類別, 並藉此分別探討其在語言文化及教育學術上的功能,特別是漢字化西方語文在漢字研究、漢字教育及提升語文互懂性方面所帶來的啟示。 本文寫作過程中，筆者有幸訪問了「漢字化德文」(2013) 作者, 德國漢字工作者——藍霄漢(Sky Darmos) 先生，謹此致謝。