The medieval Chinese tradition tells us that a given Chinese character may change its meaning when its reading is altered slightly. Modern scholars have sought principles for these changes, and from those principles have reconstructed a skeletal system of early Chinese morphology – with such elements as derivation by tone change, causative infixes, transitivising prefixes, etc. Yet it is an arresting fact that some of pre-modern China's linguistically most astute scholars inveighed against the multiple readings on which this research is based. They seem to have held strong opinions, not always made explicit, about precisely how it is that Chinese characters represent language. These two views, modern and traditional, represent fundamentally different models of how early Chinese evolved into modern Chinese.