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Abstract
There are quite a lot of folk characters in place names of villages and towns, and we have found that the forming ways of them are the addition of semantic symbols, the assimilation of graphic component, the phonetic loans and the alteration of phonetic symbols, while the main causes are the dialectal morpheme, the deficiency of recordation, the evolution of language, the conventional thinking of Chinese Characters pictophonticization, the simplified forms and the wish of pursuing good fortune and avoiding disaster, etc. This paper puts forward several suggestions on the standardization of folk characters with regard to two different types of vulgar forms, homograph and coined forms, which are, deleting the added semantic symbol, recovering the assimilated graphic component and restoring the proper graph in the history, and also further argues that lexicographers should be cautious to compile folk characters and dialectal sounds. The research and the standardization of folk characters of place names will have positive significance for the research of dialects and the compilation of dictionaries.
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