The two most well-known Chinese characters dictionaries are Songben Yupian from China and Quanyun Yupian from Korea. These dictionaries contain a wealth of information on Chinese characters at the diachronic and synchronic level, while also retaining much information on Chinese characters during the period of its movement overseas. This paper is a corpus-based study which analyzes the differences in the style of arrangement, phonetic notation mode, interpretation, form interpretation, and other aspects of the two dictionaries, and further summarizes the laws of the development of Chinese characters in overseas dissemination. The result of this study indicates that the function of the two dictionaries is different, that the Chinese characters remained stable during their transmission to other countries, and that the overall trend in the evolution of the characters is toward simplification, and that the main way that Chinese characters morph extraterritorially is via phonetic and semantic replacement.

The history of the spread and development of Chinese characters in Korea is very long. Chinese characters were introduced into the Korean peninsula as early as in the period from the end of the Han Dynasty to the Three Kingdoms (A.D. 3C). Until the end of the 19th century, Chinese characters were the official writing system in Korea. The Korean peninsula has a history of using Chinese characters for over 1,500 years. It has an incomparably rich collection of ancient texts and documents written with Chinese characters. Of them are a considerable number of stone carvings that authentically recorded the profound literacy of the Korean people in the Middle Ages as far as the culture of Chinese characters is concerned. At the same time, these stone carvings are also of valuable reference for the developmental transformations and the configurational patterns since the formation of the clerical script, through the Wei-Jin period, the Sui and the Tan dynasties, and all the way through modern times. The present study takes as an example of the stone tablet of Master Chinkam Sŏnsa of the Silla era collected in Korean Grand Compendium of Ancient Inscriptions published by the Korean Studies Institute. I specifically summarized and analyzed the alternative script of ancient Chinese characters in the Korean stone carvings. I found out that there are characters written with different strokes or in a different internal structure, those which have been simplified, those which some parts have been added to or subtracted from, and those with a different position. Then I explored the formation and the developmental trajectory of individual variant forms of a Chinese character. Thus, I grasped the reasons for the formation of the variant Chinese characters in Korean ancient stone carvings as well as their writing characteristics.