The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving
By The Editors

(Credit: Princeton University Art Museum)

Detail of a Ming Dynasty scroll by Zhu Yunming in the cursive script.
The Times recently published an article about China’s effort to manage the vast number of characters in the Chinese language. A government computer database, designed to recognize people’s names on identity cards, is programmed to read about 32,000 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, cutting out the more “obscure” characters.

This is not the first attempt to modernize a sprawling and ancient language. The most ambitious effort was the introduction of a simplified system of writing in the 1950s. As part of the Communist Party’s campaign to reduce illiteracy, simplified characters were promoted as the common written language, replacing many traditional characters.

More than five decades later, simplified characters remain the standard writing system of China, while Chinese elsewhere — especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong — continue to use traditional characters.

We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.


Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, professor of Chinese literary studies Eugene Wang, professor of Asian art Hsuan Meng, writer, World Journal Weekly Norman Matloff, computer scientist
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The Utopian Ideal in Writing
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow is an associate professor of Chinese literary and cultural studies at Harvard University.

The utopian impulses behind standardization and simplification of a living language are always understandable. Increased literacy, administrative efficiency, and ease of communication are laudable goals. But those impulses can also strip a language of its wit, whimsy, and play, not to mention its capacity to accommodate new concepts and usages.

The inability to read traditional characters is to close oneself off to Chinese history and arts before the 1950s.
Traditional characters and simplified characters never were two separate and autonomous language systems — they have always existed on a continuum. Many simplified characters are adaptations from common usage in Chinese cursive script; on the other hand, the inability to read traditional characters is to close oneself off to much of the Chinese cultural legacy — its history and arts — before the 1950s.

Since I grew up in Taiwan, where reading and writing in traditional characters is the norm, simplified characters were a novelty and a bit of a challenge, and perhaps, something to be sniffed at. But when my first job after college led me to Beijing to work as a literary translator, I spent the first week furtively consulting a little manual of “Simplified/Traditional Character Conversion” before I became fully comfortable with the new system, including learning to write my name in a way that was comprehensible to desk clerks. The experience taught me the follies of being a cultural purist.

Given the increasing flow of published and online materials among the mainland China, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese diasporas, a literate reader must have the ability to code-switch. Thus, the answer is not either/or, but — annoyingly for policy makers — both.


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Elitism vs. Populism
Eugene Wang is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller professor of Asian art at Harvard University.

Simplifying traditional Chinese characters was a linguistic democratization and one of China’s most successful progressive programs in the 1950s. The majority of the population was lifted out of illiteracy.

Literacy had long remained a privilege and a source of power wielded by the elitist few. With the characters made easier to learn, the key to knowledge embedded in written texts was handed to a wide population.

The running- and cursive-hand in traditional Chinese calligraphy is a radically simplified form.
A clash between traditional and simplified characters comes down to elitism vs. populism. A recent poll conducted by Sohu.com on whether to reinstate the traditional characters shows that more netizens oppose it. Behind the elitism/populism divide is the opposition between an archaistic nostalgia toward the illusory “purer” traditional Chinese literacy and a pragmatic and forward-looking modern drive. (Both Singapore and Malaysia, with sizable Chinese populations, also adopted simplified characters decades ago.)

Advocates for reinstating traditional characters exaggerate the break of the simplified system from the traditional orthography. Simplified characters still retain the basic structure of traditional ideographs. The structural continuity makes the switch between them easy and smooth, a skill any educated person can quickly acquire. Many of the simplified characters had been in existence for more than a millennium. Manuscripts unearthed from ancient tombs and medieval caves suggest that some simplified characters now used were already in currency then. The reform in the 1950s only officially legitimated these underground “outlaw” vernacular characters.

Aesthetic appeal is another argument made for reinstating traditional characters. Calligraphy, the quintessential aesthetic form of Chinese writing, in fact favors simplification. The running- and cursive-hand in Chinese calligraphy has always been the most radical form of simplifying characters. The six-stroke character xing (running), for instance, was reduced to a mere two vertical strokes in medieval calligraphic practice.

It’s true that computer keyboarding has now made the dreaded writing of multi-stroke-characters mostly moot. But why require schoolchildren to spend time and cognitive energy learning overly complicated ideographs in this age of information explosion, so vastly different from traditional society? Why not let them acquire the simplified form first, and if they desire, move on to master traditional characters? The first step is for efficiency; the second is for cultural refinement. That is why every society has the division of labor between bankers and poets.


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The Chinese Canon, Diminished
Hsuan Meng writes a column for World Journal Weekly.

Language is about cultural identity. This is especially true in the case of the written Chinese language, which has evolved for at least three millenniums and is now used by one and a half billion people worldwide. Given the language’s long history, future Chinese readers and writers may have to live with the consequences of current decisions long after today’s powers and regimes have ceased to exist.

The advantage of traditional characters is that they offer a stronger and richer connection with the history of the Chinese language. The simplified writing system has reduced the variety and changed the nature of many character shapes, making it more difficult for people to access classical texts in their full richness.

The writings of Confucius, Lao Tzu and countless others exploited the full range and expression of the traditional Chinese characters.
This is more than an academic concern. Just as Shakespeare’s plays and the language he used serve as a foundation for the English language, so are the canonical writings of Confucius, Lao Tzu and countless others who had exploited the full range and expression of the traditional characters.

Proponents of simplified characters say that simplified characters are easier to learn. But I have found no rigorous study that fully proves this. Moreover, some studies have shown that the simplification process, by warping the shapes of characters, can cause confusion in the meaning of characters.

In Taiwan and Hong Kong, schoolchildren have no trouble learning traditional characters, and those regions demonstrate some of the highest literacy rates in the world. Meanwhile, in recent decades, the People’s Republic has implemented policies that implicitly acknowledge the practical, cultural and aesthetic values of traditional Chinese: some traditional characters have been restored to use, and the government permits traditional characters in the practice of calligraphy.

The push to simplify Chinese reflects contemporary political agendas more than a desire for a good solution. We should find ways to promote coexistence of both systems of writing.

This essay was translated from the Chinese by Victoria Meng.


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How a Computer Might Respond
Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of KuaiXue, a software tool for learning Chinese.

The original rationale for simplification was to accelerate the learning process. But is this necessary today, given China’s much improved economic and social conditions? There may be no easy answer.

What’s certain is that converting from the simplified characters, or jiantizi, to the traditional characters, fantizi, would be a huge task, affecting everything from school textbooks to government documents to online systems. Automation of that process would present serious technical challenges.

The trouble stems from fundamental differences in the two character sets. The simplification process of the 1950s sometimes resulted in two different traditional characters becoming identical in simplified form. For instance, the traditional characters 發 (”develop”) and 髮 (”hair”) are both written as the simplified character, 发. When the software sees the latter, it must guess which of 發 and 髮 is intended. Typically the guess is made by analyzing context. Sometimes, the software can produce the occasional howler. A passage describing “loss of face” might be translated by the computer as loss of 麵 (”noodles”) rather than loss of 面 (”face”)!

So while most of the process could be automated, especially with more fine tuning in the software, much work would need to be done by hand as well.
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1. May 2, 2009
6:25 pm

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“….the inability to read traditional characters is to close oneself off to much of the Chinese cultural legacy — its history and arts — before the 1950s.”

Indeed, wasn’t that the purpose of simplified Chinese, to destroy knowledge of the Chinese culture so that Communism could take its place?

— James

2. May 2, 2009
8:18 pm

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I strongly disagree with Prof Wang, bringing class warfare into the discussion is uncalled for. As pointed out by Mr. Meng, students in Hong Kong and Taiwan have no problem learning traditional Chinese characters. I can attest to that as I grew up in Hong Kong.

Prof. Matloff also pointed out the fallacy of simplified Chinese. So many times, the same simplified character has two different meanings. One that really bothers me is simplified Chinese uses the same character for “queen” and “behind”.

Like Prof. Chow before she went to Beijing, I have a lot of difficulties reading simplified Chinese. I think the solution is to re-unify Chinese writing, perhaps using a hybrid but leaning toward traditional Chinese. We can start by using technology to switch between the two sets of writing. Having two sets of characters also hinders commerce.

— Guy M Wong

3. May 2, 2009
10:30 pm

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I am a native speaker of English who is learning Chinese. I prefer traditional characters because I find them easier to memorize. Characters are made of component parts (radicals) that are based on ancient ideograms. The traditional-character radicals are all very distinctive-looking because they are so complicated. For example, the “cart” radical has seven strokes, and it really does look like a cart. The simplified version looks like a mash-up of the letter z and the number 7, and bears a confusing resemblance to the “metal,” “speech,” and other simplified radicals. I can read simplified characters a little bit, and I hope I’ll be able to switch back and forth someday as the professor recommends, but for now, I recommend starting with traditional characters if you are learning for the first time.

— Almendra

4. May 3, 2009
12:35 am

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As as student of chinese language, and in some circumstances having both tranditional and simplified characters to choose from, I always chose traditional characters to be the path of least resistance to learning. Because they were more complex, and conveyed the “story” behind the character, they were much easier to memorize and create the self-learning process of character analysis. Simplified characters just seemed like chicken scratch to me. although there is a set system in place to change traditional characters to simplified in a logical set procedure, the reduction of strokes does not make it in anyw way easier to become literate in chinese. In fact, it makes it harder. Claims that simplifying the characters increased literacy for millions of chinese are completely erroneous.

— David Freericks

5. May 3, 2009
12:41 am

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So yes, I completely agree with Almendra above and her fine description of character component analysis being enabled by traditional characters, and process that is completely muddled by simplified characters.

— David Freericks

6. May 3, 2009
12:55 am

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Chinese written language expressed by chinese characters is a form of habit. For example, I grew up with traditional Chinese characters. As a result, I didn’t find it hard to learn or bothersom to write.

In short, I think the rationale that simplified Chinese characters are easier to learn or it is more efficient to write in simplified Chinese characters is baseless.

Even though Chinese characters are a tool for communication, it is also a legacy of Chinese culture and tradition. In this regard, traditional Chinese characters have every reason to be preserved not only as a cultural heritage but as a form of daily written communication, because this is the long-lasting way to preserve a written tradition.

Considering majority of the languages throughout the world are undergoing rapid extinction, Chinese people should take to heart that it is their privilege, duty and pride to be able to preserve and still use their written language in a form that has been developed throughout thousands of years.

It is such a remarkable legacy should not be abandoned easily.

At this point, it is up to the policy makers in Beijin to make traditional Chinese characters mainstream again, since most of the Chinese people who use simplified Chinese characters live in the Mainland China and China has emerged into an important player in the world.

— seanmac

7. May 3, 2009
3:12 am

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I think the most rational way to deal with the problems created by simplified characters is to switch back to traditional characters completely. Culturally speaking, a few thousand years’ worth of tradition is more valuable that what has been created in the last 50. As for the writings in the sciences, knowledge is being updated constantly anyway, so there is no need to worry about the recent publications becoming inaccessible to future students. As for scholars studying the history of the People’s Republic China, they can always spend the extra effort to learn the simplified characters!

— Aaron Readers

8. May 3, 2009
4:35 am

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“Language is about cultural identity.”

and

“Just as Shakespeare’s plays and the language he used serve as a foundation for the English language…”

Yes, language and culture have changed vastly in the past 400 years. The language that I type and you read would be hard to recognize by Mr. Shakespeare, and I sometimes have difficulty understanding Mr. Shakespeare’s writing. Language and culture will continue to change, so much so that I predict in 400 years Mr. Shakespeare’s writing will have to be analyzed like the Dead Sea Scrolls are today (if at all). It would be interesting to see what happens in China.

I know only a little about the Chinese languages, but I believe that the personal computer and the Internet have given each of us more of a voice in what we want to say, how we want to say it and what kind of culture we want to identify with.

— thomas bishop

9. May 3, 2009
4:57 am

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I’ve been living and working in China for the past 3 years. I’ve been making the effort to learn the language (sadly most foreigners here don’t) and I have to say I’m grateful for the simplified characters. They’re much easier to read and much faster to write than the traditional set. I’ve got no problem with people learning the traditional set for enjoyment, but the language is complex and sprawling as it is - what’s the harm in making the language more accessible and clear?

— Luis

10. May 3, 2009
5:09 am

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I wrote a similar comment to the article on the Economist discussing about the Chinese script. I think I shall do this again.

Nostalgia is probably not a good enough reason to re-introduce traditional characters to the people of China. But compared to their simplified counterparts, however, traditional characters are much more effective in conveying concepts and decreasing ambiguities, satisfying the two essential needs of a language.

As mentioned by Professor Matloff, various traditional characters may only be represented by ONE simplified character; that said, those who can’t read Chinese can imagine how much confusion this has caused.

Having too many characters that look like each other impedes the time to read, a question that did not appear till the rise of the simplified characters. This is especially true when it comes to reading more chanlleging literature like classical Chinese. As a native Chinese speaker from Hong Kong, I can attest that perusing modern Chinese novels and articles in traditional characters takes little effort, for every character has meaning. This is unlike reading in English, in which case the connection amongst the constantly appearing letters must be discerned before the reader can recognize them as a word with its independent concept. I often need to spend extra time when reading literature in simplified characters, pausing often when coming across many characters with very different meanings that look alike.

In Korea and Japan, Chinese characters have not been abandoned. Although people in Japan use their own form of simplified characters, these symbols have not been overly simplified and still look very similar to their traditional roots. In Korea, journalists often use characters to clarify ambiguities when phonetics of their language can’t do the job. People of these two countries are fairly familiar with Chinese characters, and simplified characters cannot build a foundation for them to better understand the language.

Wang argues that Malaysia and Singaporeans have espoused simplified characters. Yet, he fails to point out that traditional characters are still widely used in these two countries. Signs and posters are sometimes written in traditional characters, an act which is illegal in China unless the characters are written in traditional calligraphy. Some adamant journalists write and publish in traditional characters, which has been illegalized in China. If the simplified characters were so faultness, why would the Chinese in these countries, being educated in simplified characters in the past two decades, still have not abandoned the traditional script?

Freedom of speech is an universal value. By creating a new script whilst banning the traditional one, the Chinese government has been infringing upon this basic right of its people for the past five decades. If the innovation of a language prevents clear communication and restricts the people from clear expression, should we still consider the revoluntionary step laudable?

— Nelson

11. May 3, 2009
5:49 am

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This rich discussion of the symbolic representation of the Chinese language is also important to many of us who, unable to speak or read Chinese, are nonetheless thrilled by the obvious visual beauty and energy of classical Chinese calligraphy.

— Daniel L. Purich

12. May 3, 2009
6:00 am

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Pretty straightforward: The mainlanders above prefer simplified and argue convincing, while the same can be said of the those not part of the Da Lu. Pointless.

I’ve studied simplified because I live in China, not the outliers. Had they been in the fold earlier, this topic wouldn’t even exist. In all, Taiwan and Hong Kong account for a tiny percentage of the language’s speakers. Traditional characters are nice to look at and sometimes I prefer them, such as the character for country, Guo. Others, such as Che for vehicle, are simply much faster to write with simplified. Its language, not art folks. If you want to create poetry, do it with the substance of the words, not with the way the “letters” are written.

Thanks for reading.

— Patrick

13. May 3, 2009
6:52 am

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I had a Chinese schoolmate at university, and have tried looking at Chinese, but strictly as a dilettante. Much of what I’d been taught proved incorrect (like Bill Bryson’s claim that the Chinese word for ’song’ is formed from the words for ‘bird’ and ‘mouth.’)

Elementary psychology dictates that traditional Chinese characters are easier to read (more information is provided to the reader) but harder to write, e.g., the traditional character for horse (馬）is said (especially by people not from the mainland) to look much more like a horse than the simplified character (马).

***

In 1950, the US added Taiwan to its defensive sphere against the Communists. As part of the competition, both the US and the Chinese mainland were determined to achieve near-universal literacy, and both succeeded. The US succeeded by throwing money at the problem. (The British managed a similar success in making Hong Kong literate, presumably for less money, given limited British resources.)

On the mainland, one of Mao’s advisers pointed out that the French had made progress on literacy in Indochina by abandoning Chinese characters and introducing the Latin alphabet. Mao agreed. Another adviser said that China must remain Chinese, and so must keep Chinese characters, but the old characters were much too complicated to teach, and must be simplified. Mao agreed. So the old characters were simplified, and all characters acquired an official spelling in an extended Latin alphabet (from whence Peking became, officially, Beijing). The end result was near universal literacy on the Mainland, as well as in Taiwan and Hong Kong, neither of which adopted the Latin alphabet nor simplified the traditional Chinese characters.

***

I started school at a cusp when one professor of English literature taught Chaucer as originally written (Whan that April with his showres soote), while another used a modern ‘translation’ (When April with its fresh showers). Educated people from Mainland China are able to read traditional characters, and I’m guessing it’s like my reading Chaucer in the original.

***

I found Mr. Matloff’s article fascinating: I have two computer programs that claim to translate from simplified to traditional, but, as a dilettante of Chinese, I didn’t realise that those programs don’t always work. I did notice that my dictionary sometimes gives very different pronunciations and meanings to characters, but didn’t realize that this was because some complex but frequently used characters (like the one for noodles) were simplified to existing simpler characters (like the one for face), and these simplified characters thereby acquired multiple pronunciations and multiple meanings, again, making the simplified characters harder to read but easier to write.

***
In China, like everywhere, elaborate calligraphy, once required for all the small number of scribes, was first replaced with simplified writing for the masses, and this simplified writing is now being replaced with electronic writing using a keyboard. The computer is just as happy to produce traditional characters as simplified characters, and with no more effort on the part of the writer.

It would be only an inconvenience for the mainland to abandon simplified characters and return to the traditional ones, but this is an inconvenience the current government of China has no desire to undergo, and it is an inconvenience that, as the simplified characters acquire the respectability that comes with age, is unlikely to happen unless a scholar of classical Chinese becomes President of China in the very near future.

— Michael Wolfe

14. May 3, 2009
7:03 am

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Language transmits not only ideas, but also culture.
When learning traditional chinese you get insight into the mind and psyche of the chinese. This context is just as critical as the rote character learning if one intends to interact and understand the chinese people.

I think Prof. Wang is misguided to suggest “Literacy had long remained a privilege and a source of power wielded by the elitist few. ” Illiteracy in China was more due to a lack of means than a conscious exclusion. “Elite” might be a more appropriate term here.

— Bruce

15. May 3, 2009
7:09 am

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I have one question, having lived in China for three years. Who and how are new Chinese characters created?
For example the new English world ‘blob’ from ‘web and log,’
Who in Beijing and how did they come up with a character(s) for ‘blog?’ And more importantly why?

— Magic Dragon

16. May 3, 2009
8:12 am

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As a native English speaker who learned the somewhat simplified characters used in Japanese and the traditional characters used in Korea (still!) and Taiwan in the course of learning Japanese and Korean, I agree with Almendra that traditionl characters are easier to learn and memorize. Not only because the meaning components are preserved, but even more so because the phontic components are. Most Chinese characters consist of a radical, which gives you a general idea of the category of the meaning, and another component which tells you how to pronouce it. (Sometimes the phonetic part also contributes to the meaning and sometimes there are more than components, too.) The simplifications in modern Chinese have interfered with the phonetic components to the extent that it is often impossible to guess how to pronounce a character that one doesn’t know already, especially when 2 unrelated chracaters have been simplified to resemble each other.

Granted, it is easier to write simplified characters (but not read them), but with the use of computers this is increasingly less of an issue.

— Malcolm

17. May 3, 2009
8:15 am

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There are also the colloquial characters used by dialects for example in Cantonese such as 佢哋 (they), 嚟 (come), or 冇 (not have). There are loads of these and they are used by many newspapers in Hong Kong (and I guess in Macau).

— Dave

18. May 3, 2009
8:42 am

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my english not very good, i’m not sure if i totally understand what mr. Norman Matloff talked about.

but if he mean that it is not easy to switch from simplified chinese to traditional chinese in computer, i must say that’s not true. we have many kind of input programms, many of them can easily switch from one to another, all you need is a click.

for example:

traditional chinese: 頭髮 發展
simplified chinese: 头发 发展

just a click.

— aha

19. May 3, 2009
8:43 am

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If you are educated in one of these two systems, you will probably favor your own system. I am speaking for myself here as I was educated in simplified Chinese which I favor although I can read the traditional Chinese without any difficulties. Clearly, even the experts here cannot agree on one system. So the debate is not going to make any difference for people who have already learned Chinese.

Instead, let us try to look at this question from a new learner’s point of view, who needs to pick one system to learn (or both as suggested by one of the expert here). I would start this analysis by considering the purposes that languages serve. The most important purpose of a language is definitely to communicate with native speakers. The traditional system is more difficult to learn and allows you to communicate a little better with a population of approximately 23 million. The simplified system is easier and allows you to communicate better with the other part of Chinese population which is more than 1.33 billion. I am not saying that a language is unworthy just because the native speaker population is small. I am saying here that if you have to pick one (to start with at least), you should optimize your learning by reducing required efforts and maximizing its benefits.

The second most important purpose that languages serve is probably knowledge accumulation and propagation. If you want to learn the language to study archeology or other fields that require reading ancient documents, then the traditional system is probably better for you. But if you want study anything modern, the simplified system will definitely provide you with access to more contents, probably better contents in science and technology.

— ZIYONG CAI

20. May 3, 2009
8:45 am

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A new technology has been released this week to learn Chinese characters on your iPhone. See the Lucky Grasshopper, http://www.luckygrasshopper.com/
It just landed in the App Store.

— Dr. Max Stamper

21. May 3, 2009
9:02 am

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Those in a position to comment on this blog are more likely from Taiwan or HK (myself included) than Mainland (especially rural) China, hence the preference for traditional characters.

Yes, illiteracy is not a problem in Taiwan or HK; but these places do not have impoverished billions in rural region without access to proper education.

The simplified version was one of many socio-political tools to achieve wider & higher literacy among Chinese peasants. It has achieved that objective brilliantly.

All languages are living and evolving, including “traditional” Chinese. If one were to take their purist argument to an extreme, one would advocate the return to wenyanwen in favor of baihuawen in use today.

So in making arguments one way or another, no one should forget the billions who would have remained illiterate had simplified characters not been enacted.

— Robert

22. May 3, 2009
9:12 am

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One can easily see a division between those who use tranditional characters and those who use simplified ones. There is no easy solution. I grow up learning simplified Chinese, but I can read tranditional ones with no problem. Some features in tranditional characters have been lost in simplified ones, but like Profs Chow and Wang said simplified characters are partly evolved from history and retain the root of Chinese language. Don’t forget, simplification did helped lifting the literacy in vast rural areas. Chinese trandition and culture is best reserved by most people who can access and learn the language. Personaly, I prefer exposure of tranditional characters to simplified Chinese users. More exposure and accesses are never be harmful. Anyway the goals computer systems and administrative tasks are to better serve people. Why not try it if it is good for the people?

— blinded1

23. May 3, 2009
9:19 am

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wang’s take seems overly pushy. plus he cites a survey conducted by the sohu. that’s like polling yahoo users if they would like to continue using modern english or switch back to shakespearean english.

— max

24. May 3, 2009
9:26 am

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An addition:

It is an ineverblity that simplified Chinese will dominate and overwrite the tranditional ones. The trend is not only happening in Malaysia and Singapore, but also in North America and European Chinese communities - simply because there are more than billion people are using it.

— blinded1

25. May 3, 2009
9:54 am

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The confusion raised by Mr. Matloff occurs most often in computer generated Chinese text. The trouble is due to the governments arbitrarily assigning certain amount of frequently used words as limit for “literacy competence”. In the mainland, the government originally designated about 7000 characters as standard under the gb-code, whereas Taiwan designated 12000 characters under the big-5 code. While in handwriting, anyone who is proficient in the Chinese language has no trouble converting into the right characters, the computer does not have this intelligence with the result of the example given by Mr. Matloff. Because the traditional “hair” is not in the commonly used list of simplified characters, the computer just gives a similar sounding but the wrong traditional character.
Solutions: 1. Standardize the 2 forms of writing leaning toward simplified forms; 2. increase or restore the correct characters in the simplified system to match those in the traditional system.

May 2, 2009, 5:00 pm
The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving
By The Editors

(Credit: Princeton University Art Museum)

Detail of a Ming Dynasty scroll by Zhu Yunming in the cursive script.
The Times recently published an article about China’s effort to manage the vast number of characters in the Chinese language. A government computer database, designed to recognize people’s names on identity cards, is programmed to read about 32,000 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, cutting out the more “obscure” characters.

This is not the first attempt to modernize a sprawling and ancient language. The most ambitious effort was the introduction of a simplified system of writing in the 1950s. As part of the Communist Party’s campaign to reduce illiteracy, simplified characters were promoted as the common written language, replacing many traditional characters.

More than five decades later, simplified characters remain the standard writing system of China, while Chinese elsewhere — especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong — continue to use traditional characters.

We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.


Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, professor of Chinese literary studies Eugene Wang, professor of Asian art Hsuan Meng, writer, World Journal Weekly Norman Matloff, computer scientist
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The Utopian Ideal in Writing
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow is an associate professor of Chinese literary and cultural studies at Harvard University.

The utopian impulses behind standardization and simplification of a living language are always understandable. Increased literacy, administrative efficiency, and ease of communication are laudable goals. But those impulses can also strip a language of its wit, whimsy, and play, not to mention its capacity to accommodate new concepts and usages.

The inability to read traditional characters is to close oneself off to Chinese history and arts before the 1950s.
Traditional characters and simplified characters never were two separate and autonomous language systems — they have always existed on a continuum. Many simplified characters are adaptations from common usage in Chinese cursive script; on the other hand, the inability to read traditional characters is to close oneself off to much of the Chinese cultural legacy — its history and arts — before the 1950s.

Since I grew up in Taiwan, where reading and writing in traditional characters is the norm, simplified characters were a novelty and a bit of a challenge, and perhaps, something to be sniffed at. But when my first job after college led me to Beijing to work as a literary translator, I spent the first week furtively consulting a little manual of “Simplified/Traditional Character Conversion” before I became fully comfortable with the new system, including learning to write my name in a way that was comprehensible to desk clerks. The experience taught me the follies of being a cultural purist.

Given the increasing flow of published and online materials among the mainland China, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese diasporas, a literate reader must have the ability to code-switch. Thus, the answer is not either/or, but — annoyingly for policy makers — both.


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Elitism vs. Populism
Eugene Wang is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller professor of Asian art at Harvard University.

Simplifying traditional Chinese characters was a linguistic democratization and one of China’s most successful progressive programs in the 1950s. The majority of the population was lifted out of illiteracy.

Literacy had long remained a privilege and a source of power wielded by the elitist few. With the characters made easier to learn, the key to knowledge embedded in written texts was handed to a wide population.

The running- and cursive-hand in traditional Chinese calligraphy is a radically simplified form.
A clash between traditional and simplified characters comes down to elitism vs. populism. A recent poll conducted by Sohu.com on whether to reinstate the traditional characters shows that more netizens oppose it. Behind the elitism/populism divide is the opposition between an archaistic nostalgia toward the illusory “purer” traditional Chinese literacy and a pragmatic and forward-looking modern drive. (Both Singapore and Malaysia, with sizable Chinese populations, also adopted simplified characters decades ago.)

Advocates for reinstating traditional characters exaggerate the break of the simplified system from the traditional orthography. Simplified characters still retain the basic structure of traditional ideographs. The structural continuity makes the switch between them easy and smooth, a skill any educated person can quickly acquire. Many of the simplified characters had been in existence for more than a millennium. Manuscripts unearthed from ancient tombs and medieval caves suggest that some simplified characters now used were already in currency then. The reform in the 1950s only officially legitimated these underground “outlaw” vernacular characters.

Aesthetic appeal is another argument made for reinstating traditional characters. Calligraphy, the quintessential aesthetic form of Chinese writing, in fact favors simplification. The running- and cursive-hand in Chinese calligraphy has always been the most radical form of simplifying characters. The six-stroke character xing (running), for instance, was reduced to a mere two vertical strokes in medieval calligraphic practice.

It’s true that computer keyboarding has now made the dreaded writing of multi-stroke-characters mostly moot. But why require schoolchildren to spend time and cognitive energy learning overly complicated ideographs in this age of information explosion, so vastly different from traditional society? Why not let them acquire the simplified form first, and if they desire, move on to master traditional characters? The first step is for efficiency; the second is for cultural refinement. That is why every society has the division of labor between bankers and poets.


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The Chinese Canon, Diminished
Hsuan Meng writes a column for World Journal Weekly.

Language is about cultural identity. This is especially true in the case of the written Chinese language, which has evolved for at least three millenniums and is now used by one and a half billion people worldwide. Given the language’s long history, future Chinese readers and writers may have to live with the consequences of current decisions long after today’s powers and regimes have ceased to exist.

The advantage of traditional characters is that they offer a stronger and richer connection with the history of the Chinese language. The simplified writing system has reduced the variety and changed the nature of many character shapes, making it more difficult for people to access classical texts in their full richness.

The writings of Confucius, Lao Tzu and countless others exploited the full range and expression of the traditional Chinese characters.
This is more than an academic concern. Just as Shakespeare’s plays and the language he used serve as a foundation for the English language, so are the canonical writings of Confucius, Lao Tzu and countless others who had exploited the full range and expression of the traditional characters.

Proponents of simplified characters say that simplified characters are easier to learn. But I have found no rigorous study that fully proves this. Moreover, some studies have shown that the simplification process, by warping the shapes of characters, can cause confusion in the meaning of characters.

In Taiwan and Hong Kong, schoolchildren have no trouble learning traditional characters, and those regions demonstrate some of the highest literacy rates in the world. Meanwhile, in recent decades, the People’s Republic has implemented policies that implicitly acknowledge the practical, cultural and aesthetic values of traditional Chinese: some traditional characters have been restored to use, and the government permits traditional characters in the practice of calligraphy.

The push to simplify Chinese reflects contemporary political agendas more than a desire for a good solution. We should find ways to promote coexistence of both systems of writing.

This essay was translated from the Chinese by Victoria Meng.


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How a Computer Might Respond
Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of KuaiXue, a software tool for learning Chinese.

The original rationale for simplification was to accelerate the learning process. But is this necessary today, given China’s much improved economic and social conditions? There may be no easy answer.

What’s certain is that converting from the simplified characters, or jiantizi, to the traditional characters, fantizi, would be a huge task, affecting everything from school textbooks to government documents to online systems. Automation of that process would present serious technical challenges.

The trouble stems from fundamental differences in the two character sets. The simplification process of the 1950s sometimes resulted in two different traditional characters becoming identical in simplified form. For instance, the traditional characters 發 (”develop”) and 髮 (”hair”) are both written as the simplified character, 发. When the software sees the latter, it must guess which of 發 and 髮 is intended. Typically the guess is made by analyzing context. Sometimes, the software can produce the occasional howler. A passage describing “loss of face” might be translated by the computer as loss of 麵 (”noodles”) rather than loss of 面 (”face”)!

So while most of the process could be automated, especially with more fine tuning in the software, much work would need to be done by hand as well.
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26. May 3, 2009
9:56 am

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OMG, 55,000 characters, is there no way to create characters that represent vowels and consonants. Trying not to sound like an elitist or insensitive, I would think that languages become fluid to accommodate cultural changes that are forever taking place. From my own multilingual experience I see that happening in the languages that I speak and understand. And although in Spanish we have a few extra symbols and accents in the alphabet it sure beats 55,000. As in French once you understand the pronunciation and placement of these accents and symbols, well the rest is just a piece of cadeaux/ bizcocho.

— Tiempo Primo

27. May 3, 2009
9:57 am

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Born in China Mainland, and educated by the simplified characters, I have never known anyone with “the inability to read traditional characters”.

Traditional characters appearing in isolation from a context may pose a threat to simplified character users, but never in a passage, not even in Confucius’s Analects.

For me, the only problem with traditional characters is that I have to switch to a larger font when reading them on screen.

— M. Cai

28. May 3, 2009
10:07 am

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Almendra and Professor Matloff rightly point out the fact that simplified characters take more effort to read because less information is given in the character or the characters lose many of their distinguishing features, forcing a greater reliance on using context to disambiguate. The original concept behind simplified characters, that they were easier to learn, is fundamentally flawed. Their only advantage is that they are faster to write by hand.

One generally prefers whatever system one learns first, and I detested simplified characters for a long time, but now I read both without even thinking about it, especially in modern Chinese, where the prevalence of two-syllable (and therefore two-character) words makes disambiguation of the individual component characters relatively simple. But people who do not routinely move back and forth between the two orthographies will stoutly resist being forced to give up “their” writing system for other one.

Hats off to Google, by the way, for making a search in either system return results in both systems!

All this, however, is really irrelevant to the original topic of restricting the characters that can be used for names. The technical limitations that prompted the Japanese to institute a similar but far more limiting rule many decades ago are less significant nowadays; nevertheless, even if one uses a form-based input system to enter characters into a database or text (and thus does not have to scroll through a long list of homophones to choose the input character), rare characters generally have to be laboriously hunted down in supplementary character sets, and invented characters, though one can create their image in a computer and give them labels, get impossibly cumbersome to manage.

I think the Chinese government is right to ask people to be creative in realms other than giving themselves names that, in a face-to-face situation, require elaborate explanations and, in a face-to-interface situation, defy input and retrieval. And 32,000 characters still leaves a lot of room for historically or poetically evocative names.

— Stu

29. May 3, 2009
10:09 am

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This is a great topic, but is poorly handled by the NYTimes. Why do we get no comments at all from linguists, especially socio-linguists, who study and write about these sorts of issues of language control regularly? There is no comparison made by any of the contributors, for example, to the effort at simplification done in Japan, the so-called Toyo Kanji system, in the early post-war period. The Japanese, after all, use Chinese characters also. Efforts at control over language and language change have a venerable and instructive history (the French aren’t the only western people to engage in this). More on this would have been welcome.

— Scott

30. May 3, 2009
10:13 am

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I’m a Westerner whose second language is Chinese. I went through a year of Chinese instruction in traditional characters before being allowed to switch to simplified, and I as well as nine out of ten of my classmates heaved a sigh of relief the second year. Common 10-stroke characters reduces to three! 18-stroke characters reduced to four! Traditional characters may or may not be slightly easier to recognize, but writing them is a chore.

Events students in Hong Kong and Taiwan write in simplified when they take tests. Cutting off 5-10 strokes per character can provide critical minutes of thinking time on an exam.

After school, I forgot most of my traditional characters, but I have since picked them up again from Hong Kong film subtitles and dissident blogs (which are much more likely to exist in traditional than simplified characters). Much easier to switch between the two than between, say, the Mandarin and Cantonese spoken dialects.

— Matt L

31. May 3, 2009
10:24 am

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Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn’t it be simpler and better to switch to a phonetic alphabet? Although it would take a massive effort at first, in the long run it would address many of the issues much better than simplified characters, and avoid many of the problems described here. Computer translation of old texts to the new language without loss of meaning should become quite easy.

Al

— Al

32. May 3, 2009
10:30 am

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I grew up in China, where the simplified characters were used, and picked up the ability to read traditional characters without much additional effort. Most of the phrases stayed the same anyway, so the brain worked wonders by inferring the meaning of a traditional character. I find it amusing that some of the folks, educated in traditional characters, find it hard to read simplified–and this is not the first time I’ve heard of this point of view. As professor Matloff pointed out, context is the key here–the distinction between simplified and traditional characters may be overrated.

This actually reminds me of the simplification of the Korean language to a phonetic alphabetic system. Like Chinese, most Korean characters sound the same but would otherwise be written differently in the old Chinese script. Now Korean speakers versed only in the alphabetic system would have to do a lot of guesswork with respect to the context.

I think in this regard, the simplified Chinese character system is still light years better than what the Koreans have done. And luckily, the complete romanization of the Chinese language, which once was on the table, was never carried through.

— W. Ke

33. May 3, 2009
10:37 am

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I grew up in Guangzhou and learned simplified characters first, though the constant stream of writings in traditional characters from Hong Kong and abroad were rather accessible (that’s before Internet age). I therefore had the fortune to grow up learning to switch back and forth between the two systems without much difficulty.

Chinese language is an evolving language, just like any other languages. It has been modified and standardized various times through its long history, granted the previous attempts were not as aggressive and far-reaching as the one implemented in the 1950s. That being said, I do find that many of the simplified characters did not make logical sense and have fundamentally violated the character-making rules many of the Chinese characters are based on. Chinese characters may seem complicated, but they have easy to follow rules in their structures. The introduction of simplified rules often violates these rules, creating unnecessary confusion and inconsistency. Such drastic (and catastrophic?) changes can certainly drive structural linguists as well as cultural linguists to scream with horror.

Although the initial reform may be well-intended to help improve literacy rate, I am not sure if simplifying the characters was in fact decisively beneficial. Prof. Wang’s argument in simplified characters’ role in helping to erase illiteracy clearly is clearly unsubstantiated. Such success could simply be the mandatory nine years of basic education that every child is required to received. Or it could be the improved economic conditions, better education infrastructures, more qualified teachers, modernized curriculum with greater emphasis on learning instead of reciting ancient text, etc.

— Kai Lee

34. May 3, 2009
10:50 am

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I am an overseas Chinese who only learned to read, write and speak Chinese, both Putonghua and Cantonese, in my late 20s. I have since been facinated by this debate, not only because of its practical consequences, but also from the linguistic depth and breadth of the Chinese language in the way it reflects its cultural heritage.

Admittedly I was first biased towards the purist approach of returning to the traditional characters, but more and more do I realize that both systems are important if not only to continue reflecting this cultural heritage for another 3,000 years. God forbid that the debate be stopped by a one-shot fix all solution, because once this debate stops, so does the evolution of Chinese language and its influence on its culture.

IanK

— IanK

35. May 3, 2009
10:59 am

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I am also a native English speaker, and learnt both systems as a foreigner, albeit with greater exposure to simp. But I have worked professionally from simp and trad for years and I find simp. inherently much easier. The sheer density of text in trad is so daunting it takes years of working with it to digest it quickly. It is easy to code switch, though, since only a small number of simp characters are unrecognisable and unguessable to a Taiwanese.
Both systems should be formally taught in all Chinese communities, as it would not take long. Trad is anyway so commonly used in the PRC (eg in company names and certificates) that most PRC Chinese can read, though not write, most of it already.

Now let me make a suggestion that will piss off the entire Chinese community: adopt the Japanese kanji. These stand halfway between Chinese trad and simp, and are easy to use without diverging too far from the originals. Ditto for the Koreans (please, no email attacks). The sooner East Asia has a unified character set, the better. It would be the first step towards the regional cooperation that is so badly needed there.

— oohkuchi

36. May 3, 2009
11:18 am

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Actually each traditional Chinese character was formulated not only by thoughtful “professional” scholars, but it has also evolved to the present form through hundreds of years of usage. Each component parts of the character had to have gone through searching considerations before they were put together to form a word. Even more basic to understanding the construction of the original Chinese word is that they all evolved from pictography, ideography, audiography, and the ancient awareness of all human senses. More than all current economic success, each original Chinese word reveals the depth of the Chinese cultural success. For this reason, the original Chinese word form should be restored in the entirety and new words may be formulated based on the logic developed since historical time. Since each original Chinese word was based on the logic of a well thought-out system, computerization should not be difficult for the minds of those who invented AOL and YouTube. .

— i-min chuang

37. May 3, 2009
11:22 am

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I studied Chinese at the Army Language School a very long time ago. My recollection is that learning the “short-forms” after learning thousands of “long-forms” was a moderate nuisance.

As for not being able to read the classics: classical Chinese is effectively a separate language. Many is time I have been able to read every character in a classical passage and still not have a clue as to what it meant. To attain facility in reading classical Chinese requires a considerable amount of study for anyone. By comparison, learning the “long-forms” would be a moderate nuisance.

In any event, what we think matters a lot less than most of us imagine. The Chinese government will decide the matter, and I expect I know which way they’re going to go.

— Ex-SP/4 Geoff Baldwin

38. May 3, 2009
11:23 am

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I am a native speaker of English who began learning Chinese at the age of 22. I studied primarily in Taiwan so I first learned traditional characters. After becoming proficient enough in the language I began working as a translator. After returning to the states I started working at a financial print company that translated IPO prospectuses for the Hong Kong market. The drafts of the prospectus were often written in simplified Chinese and would then be converted into traditional for listing. I was closely involved in the proofreading and quality assurance process between the simplified, traditional, and English versions of the documents. Before starting the job I could not read simplified characters, but it only took about a couple of weeks before I was proficient.

In terms of reading, its really not that difficult to go from traditional to simplified. Of course, writing (by hand, not with a computer) is another story. In this regard, I agree with Professor Chow.

However, regarding Professor Wang’s comments about aesthetic appeal - apart from being a terribly narrow understanding of dominant aesthetics in calligraphy, he fails to note that most people, including native readers of traditional and simplified, cant even read running style characters without spending a significant amount of time deciphering.

Moreover, having gone from reading traditional to simplified myself, I find it hard to believe that going the other way would be just as easy. Part of the reason that my transition was so brisk is because I learned the system of radicals and learned to figure out what characters mean based on hints given in the traditional character, both of which are largely diminished in the simplifed characters.

Finally, learning traditional characters itself is not inherently more difficult than learning simplified characters, especially now that most communication is digital as opposed to handwritten. The problem of illiteracy in China was not solely a function of the difficulty of learning traditional characters; indeed in “this age of information explosion, so vastly different from traditional society,” learning traditional characters is more accessible than ever.

— jay

39. May 3, 2009
11:25 am

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I’m an American who started studying Chinese 22 years ago in college. For the first 2 years we learned traditional characters which gave me an excellent grounding in the usage of traditional Chinese that I continue to employ to this day. In my third year of Chinese study our teacher introduced simplified characters. Having had 2 years of traditional characters under my belt made learning simplified characters a very straightforward exercise. In my fourth year, when we started to read longer pieces of literature, we used traditional. I then moved to Taiwan and lived and worked there for 15 years before moving to China (a few years ago).

So I’ve been thoroughly exposed to both versions. What I have to say, after all these years living in both places and using both versions of the written language, is that

1) Traditional characters are by far richer and more aesthetically pleasing than simplified characters, many of which have been stripped of their detail and thus beauty - and meaning. Just hold up the 2 versions of the character for ‘feng’ that I believe was mentioned in the NYT article and compare. Professor Wang’s argument calligraphy favors simplified characters may be true — FOR SOME CALLIGRAPHIC STYLES, FOR SOME CALLIGRAPHERS - but is an unsound comparison to make to justify the use of simplified characters. Calligraphy is one thing (art) standard written/typeset text has a completely different, usually more utilitarian (unless in the employ of literature which too is art of cours) purpose

2) Learning traditional before simplified is most likely much easier than the other way around, as Professor suggests (his rationale is incredibly lame frankly, and I don’t know why he implicitly supports getting the ‘bankers’ off the ground before helping out us ‘poets’)

3) If you look at the simplified character set closely, you will find that several characters in the simplified set overlap with the traditional set, so to some extent, the whole argument about which set is easier/harder prettier/uglier is made moot (not entirely though but worth noting here)

The suggested move to re-introduce, selectively, traditional characters seems to be a tepid, 2 steps forward 1 step back move. Either stick to what China uses now, or shift entirely back to traditional characters. I say take the plunge and move toward traditional.

— glenn

40. May 3, 2009
11:25 am

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Given that many children nowadays learn to type on the computer before they learn to write, simplified Chinese does not making learning the characters easier. Instead, traditional Chinese provides better visual cues, all along with the benefits of its aesthetic appeal and connections to ancient literature.

— -lidia

41. May 3, 2009
11:32 am

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I think we should take the simplifications even further: we should just use pinyin.

Sure, kids *can* learn Chinese character, but how much time is spent doing so? In the West, kids learning the alphabet in kindergarten or even nursery school, and they’re done with it. I can’t imagine that the amount of time spent learning the writing system is more than a few hundred hours.

But in China, our children waste hours and hours doing what in effect is a monumental rote memorization task. They surely spend years studying the characters, time which could be used to advance other schools. Chinese in Western university often are criticized for lacking creativity and writing skills, and surely some of the time spent memorizing characters is diverted away from time used to develop such skills in the West.

By using only pinyin, Chinese will become a more accessible language to foreigner. If China truly wants to expand the number of second language learners, it would be a wise move to remove what is usually the biggest hurdle in their learning: characters.

The benefit works in other direction too: Chinese will be able to enrich its vocabulary by accepting foreigner words more easily, just as English as been able to do for centuries.

To limit homophone confusing, we should keep pinyin, similar to the diacritic markings used in Vietnamese.

— Liu Dongchen

42. May 3, 2009
11:33 am

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I think the simplification of Chinese character is not an abrupt event totally forged by utopian mentalities of a communist party at its hay day. In fact, at least since the May Fourth Movement, a number of Chinese elites have been considering radical changes of its writing system which lasts a couple millennia. One of its forerunners, Qian Xuantong, even advocated that the characters should be totally abolished and substituted by roman alphabets. Such ambition, though fortunately unrealized, only dwarfs that of the simplified system of writing in the 1950s.
Actually, Chinese characters have been on the way of being simplified much earlier, that is to say, the characters have been ‘vulgarizing’ during last several centuries in a similar way to the vulgarization of classic Latin, which finally give birth to Italian, French and Spanish.

— James Wang

43. May 3, 2009
11:33 am

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Abusolutely，traditional characeter is more complex for us to use.However，you can associate it with traditional cuture and bueaty.

— Jinglin Tan

44. May 3, 2009
11:43 am

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The root problem is that China failed to convert to a Roman style phonetic based alphabet after World War II. Leading Chinese scholars urged the Chinese under Mao to switch to a Roman alphabet and China failed to act.

China is an ancient civilization. China’s rich heritage of literature can have best be left to scholars to interpret and translate into modern Chinese based on a Roman alphabet.

English is a very young language. If one goes just a little beyond Shakespeare’s day most learned discourse was in Latin or even Greek. Should school children in the West be burdened with learning Latin or Greek so they can connect with their rich Western heritage?

The root of the problem is that a language based on ideograms is not compatible with a modern international society. China reformed many archaic institutions but failed to make basic reforms to its language and is paying the price now.

— Jeff

45. May 3, 2009
12:00 pm

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Pudong Hua speaking mainlanders (mostly Beiingers) continue to delude themselves and others that one and a half billion Chinese speak and use Mandarin. This is not so at all. Mandarin is NOT the lingua franca of Chinese, just as there is no common language among Indians speaking Urdu, Hindi or Tamil. And certainly, not that many Hua Chiao (overseas) Chinese use Mandarin at all - in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam or even in Singapore. They speak their own dialects, Malay, Vietnamese and mainly English. Nobody cares whether Mandarin should be simplified or not. It is an alien language, period.

— Tan BB

46. May 3, 2009
12:03 pm

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I just returned from Beijing yesterday (aboard United — this was a wonderful flight, and the cheapest cost I found anywhere). I have been studying Chinese for many many years and I truly love the traditional characters and would never substitute the awful ’simplified” characters for it. i do understand the cursive writing — sometimes called grass writing — but first you must learn the full traditional characters. And yes — I think the communist created this (Mao for sure) just to force chinese to accept communism which is so unlike their normal social norms. I love to read Confucius in the original. But now the common people of China can do so no longer. But ALL overseas Chinese can as they rejected the simplified characters from the start.

— Charles F. Wilkes

47. May 3, 2009
12:08 pm

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Traditional, Simplified, I don’t care, I just want people to be able to communicate without misunderstanding. It would be useful to have a concordance filled with about 10,000 words that have 1:1 correspondence with exactly one word in each of the world’s major languages. Perhaps someone could develop a webpage to translate words without duplicite/multiple meanings.

— Dan in Dayton

48. May 3, 2009
12:38 pm

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If Mao’s decision to move from traditional to simplified Chinese characters seems a political act to impose Newspeak on the people to reduce their freedom and culture, then, equally, attempts to force a return to traditional characters for political reasons are utopian and misguided.

But I think there is a confusion for many here about Chinese characters. They are not the Chinese language, only one way speakers agree to write it. The written language from the May Fourth Movement was moving from a language of the gentry and intellectuals to the vernacular. Efforts to extend literacy were successful when vocabulary was restricted, as learning characters requires memorization (one point of having so many characters was that it was so difficult and took so long to learn that only the upper class could do so).

Characters are not for the most part ideograms, but represent sounds as in other languages. But Chinese has many spoken dialects, some of them mutually incomprehensible. Standardization of the national language, putonghua, requires a common written language to start. You can see that on CCTV.

Since it is easier to represent the sounds and tones in Latin characters, there was a movement to change the written language more radically, to use pinyin instead. Mao was initially in favor of that idea, but suddenly instead simplified characters were adopted. The linguist John DeFrancis described the history of this language reform. Yale successfully taught the first part of Chinese language in just pinyin, and Chinese grade school students start with pinyin before they begin memorizing characters.

The situation with written characters has changed since then. As with English handwriting, computer keyboarding has become required. Given QWERTY keyboards and pinyin, generally now writing requires inputting pinyin or the equivalent Latin characters without tone marks, and then manually selecting among homonyms. As in English writing, the means of constructing the letter forms manually has become less important than the look of the characters or words that are input, the recognition after the fact rather than the manual construction.

Naturally, this loss of construction, such as knowing the stroke order, is disappointing to many. There is a transition from one form of implicit knowledge to another. A movement back to the classical Chinese and calligraphy might be motivated by nationalist impulses, now that literacy has been extended to the masses. But if this is a language reform to restore class distinctions it would be doomed.

One could also complain that nowadays US fourth-graders are not taught cursive handwriting but taught computer keyboarding, the tyrrany of QWERTY instead of Mao, and the dumbing-down of writing and language skills.

No doubt computer users can use expanded character sets for Chinese, but they will have to build on what exists.

If there is to be further reform with Chinese characters, it should be to introduce or bring back more of the elements of the characters that represent the meaning or sound of the words, rather than try to restore some lost classical usages that seem to represent something beautiful in calligraphy. The Chinese language as all languages will resist reform from the top without sound reason, but will change over time as humans use it.

— joe.shuren, bouvet island

49. May 3, 2009
1:25 pm

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Pertinent to the ultimate root of this radical problem, we can see a hidden political agenda or a cultural reformist stance engendering the transitional basis of Simplified Chinese characters. Undoubtedly, modernity has rationalized the reformist approach which is ubiquitous in every civilization, and brought about the clash between tenets of both archaic and modern value systems. The May Fourth Movement engendered the dawn of Simplified Chinese Characters, and to some extent denigrating the solid Confucian philosophical system that has deeply influenced the history of China, yet endorsing the tenets of modernity, so much so at the stake of extirpating every existence quintessential of the Confucian archetype. (I am not an avid partisan of Confucian thought) Pedagogically speaking, it would seem much easier to write the Chinese characters with less radicals and strokes, yet encompassing different possible meanings. However, one should also really contemplate the logical relationship between the language (in this case the constituent linguistic elements or character sets) and the inherent philosophy, in this case which the axiom of a particular language, be it the different vernaculars, is to effectively disseminate the essence of a particular culture. As the Chinese saying goes, 文以載道, what is a more predominant agenda discussing the paradigm shift would be whether a change will probe for a change for the better, in this case a reversion to the Way of Chinese culture.

— Steve Ang

50. May 3, 2009
2:08 pm

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James said ““….the inability to read traditional characters is to close oneself off to much of the Chinese cultural legacy — its history and arts — before the 1950s.”

Indeed, wasn’t that the purpose of simplified Chinese, to destroy knowledge of the Chinese culture so that Communism could take its place?”

Doust ye mean just like modern English destroys knowledge of the English culture like Shakespeare?

— Gale Teschendorf

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