Certain character sums and hypergeometric series

Abstract: We prove two transformations for the $p$-adic hypergeometric series which can be described as $p$-adic analogues of a Kummer's linear transformation and a transformation of Clausen. We first evaluate two character sums, and then relate them to the $p$-adic hypergeometric series to deduce the transformations. We also find another transformation for the $p$-adic hypergeometric series from which many special values of the $p$-adic hypergeometric series as well as finite field hypergeometric functions are obtained.