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SIMPLIFIED CHINESE CHARACTERS

Entries in reverse chronological order, most recent on top:


Sunday, August 31, 2008 Joseph Ku wrote:

One of the difficulties associated with the learning of Chinese is the complexity of the characters. The second difficulty is that there are little or no hint of the pronunciation of each word or character. Finally, until recently, there is no easy logical method for dictionary lookup and keyboarding for computer input.

Simplification of the writing of the more complicated characters crept into common usage even before the communist government came into power. Examples of such simplification shown here are the character for "body" and the character for "dry". Of course, when the communists came into power, they went overboard in simplifying the characters to facilitate learning for the common masses, resulting in the set of simplified characters in use in China today, much to the displeasure of people that learned characters written in the old "formal" style or "Jing Tai". Most Chinese that live outside of mainland China, in places such as Taiwan and Southeast Asia, and including descendents of emigrants that settled in various parts of the world, were all schooled in the old "formal" style of writing

Asian countries like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam that did not develop their own writing system, adopted the Chinese characters for their own use when trading, military conquering and emigration spread Chinese culture to them in the second millennium A.D. Many of the pre- 17th century texts in those countries use the "formal" Chinese characters. Many ancient Chinese characters, no longer used in modern Chinese, are still commonly used in Japan today.

Later, many of the Asian countries developed their own phonetic systems to augment the writing of their original spoken language. Japan has the Kana symbols, Vietnam used the French alphabet, Korea developed their own set of Hanguel phonetic symbols.

In early 20th century, China adopted a phonetic system to aid the pronunciation of the characters. This is known as the "Boo, Po, Mo, Fo" system that many of us may have learned as children. Boo Po Mo Fo are the first four of the thirty eight phonetic sounds that make up the system. Children's books still have these phonetic annotations printed next to the characters. By combining the sound of the one, two, or three symbols next to the characters, together with one of four intonation indicators, one can sound out the pronunciation of each character. This system was not used much in adult texts as presumably by then one would have learned the pronunciation of each character. The Chang Kai Shek government took this system to Taiwan when the communists took over the mainland and is still taught there. The mainland Chinese government, of course, would have nothing to do with it. This system though came in handy when the Chinese Language capability first entered the PC’s. I still have a keyboard, made in Taiwan, with these Boo Po Mo Fo symbols on the key tops alongside the English alphabets. This system is rapidly fading away, even in Taiwan, as keyboard entry of Chinese using English alphabets become easier to implement and learn.

The use of the English alphabet in aiding the pronunciation of the Chinese characters, known as the Romanized System, was first introduced by European missionaries in the 19th century. The People's Republic of China adopted that as a convenient means to aid in teaching the masses to pronounce the characters. Many of the street signs and shop signs in China today still have these English character pronunciation aids under the characters. When I first encountered them in the late 80's I thought the the English words were for the convenience of foreign visitors. I wondered how the English word "Gonglu", such as in the street sign in the attached picture, would benefit a non-Chinese speaking visitor! With the introduction of the PC, this system has been formalized into the Pinying System, dominant in the keyboard entry of Chinese characters and has practically replaced all the older entry methods, many of which depend upon the breaking down of a character into their component parts. Each of these parts, called"radicals", are derived from historical hierographic origins and has symbolic meanings of their own. Many of the printed dictionaries today still use this approach for the searching of a character.

One interesting aspect of Chinese phonetics is that each Chinese character has only one syllabic sound. So, even though a character may be represented by a multiplicity of phonetic symbols, they combine to form only one syllable, unlike say in English, a word such as "beau-ti-ful" contains several syllables each represented by their own phonetic letter grouping. Interestingly, in Japanese, they use several of their kana phonetic symbol to represent a Chinese character, sounding similar to the original multi-syllabic Japanese oral word of the same meaning, they thus turn some Chinese characters into multi-syllabic words. For example, the single syllable word for school in Chinese is pronounced "ga ku" in Japanese. However the word for "department" is pronounced "bu", which is close to the original Chinese pronounciation.

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The Koreans, when they adopted their phonetic system, the Hanguel, in 1444, did a couple of clever things. First, the phonetic symbols look like the shape of the mouth when making the sound in question. Second, they combined the phonetic symbols that together make up the one syllabic sound of a Chinese character into a group, looking each somewhat like a Chinese character. This gives the advantage of


delineating the phonetic groups that belong to each individual character. The single syllabic sound thus formed in Korean, does not sound like the original Chinese character, but even in China the same character does often have different regional pronunciations.

This compact uniform word spacing of the Chinese, and the Korean Hanguel, text has the advantage of allowing the reader to use pattern recognition to "speed read", in one glance, a group of words, a familiar phrase, or even a sentence. Such technique was invented for use for speed reading of English in methods such as the "Evelyn Woods" Speed Reading method popularized in the 60s. This speed reading is practiced subconsciously by all Chinese readers rather than reading word by word. To a certain extent, so are English readers that does not have to "move their lips" when reading. The inability of a reader, trained in the "formal" characters, to do this pattern recognition with the unfamiliar simplified fonts, is the root cause of their refusal to adopt these simplified characters. Even though each simplified character individually can easily be deciphered by a "formal" style reader, by recognizing the similarity to the formal fonts, or via context within a sentence, but when viewed as a group, the pattern recognition fails when a "formal" style reader reads simplified text.

The compact uniform spacing of the Chinese and Korean texts also has the serendipitous advantage in printing type-setting by having the words equally spaced, thus eliminating the difficult and complicated techniques needed in English to deal with the variable word lengths and character widths. With modern computer power, this is no longer such a problem, but when printing was first invented, this characteristic did enable Chinese block printing to easily develop into movable type printing. This was wonderfully demonstrated in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing!

Joseph Ku



Thursday, August 21, 2008 2:36 PM PDT Reginal Mak wrote:

Great stuff, Robert.

Your comments on simplified characters are highly educational and most enjoyable.

I too was dismayed when these simplified characters first showed up. I've been struggling with some not-too-obvious abbreviated characters all the time, especially since I have not been adequately exposed to Chinese reading material over the past 48 years. I am definitely behind Ma Ying Jiu's labelling of "Jing Tai" for the traditional word-type.

It is of course my own bias reflecting my own self-interest. Intellectually, I can understand why the Chinese government was pushing the dramatic reform for the purpose of reducing illiteracy for the vast population. But unintentionally, they have now made people like me semi-illiterate.

Well, I am actually accepting the change, difficult though it is. Change of this scale is never easy, and will take a couple of generations to complete. So it will take another decade or two after we pass on. It is a monumental task to try to educate 1.3 billion people. For the good of our future generations, I accept the gross inconvenience inflicted on old dinosaurs like us. When the change is complete, we will all be long gone and will probably be reading and writing in some new cosmic language invented by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

By the way, Robert, one little thing that has always bugged me about our traditional Chinese texts is the lack of punctuations, which makes it difficult to read unfamiliar materials. I am afraid it may not strike a sympathetic chord with a scholar like you on this issue though.

Thank you for the education.

Reginald.


Thursday, August 21, 2008 1 PM PDT Robert Yan wrote:

Hi Ah Mausook,

Here's a different subject for everyone.
The outrage on the simplified Chinese characters has been raging since the 50's. You have plenty of company I assure you. I haven't met anybody outside of China mainland who likes them, though some simplified characters have been in use since the 20's. Some came to us from Japan you know that ? It seems Japan is doing it too. I myself hated them in the early years (50's) but get accustomed to them gradually because I like to read. A bookworm so to speak. Now
a white-headed old worm with not so acute eyesights. Now I can read simplified and traditional characters with equal ease, though I still much prefer the traditional type. The president of Taiwan Ma YingJiu insists on calling the traditional type ' Jing Tai' __ , instead of __ 'Farn Tai' as it is usually called. Here I wholeheartedly agree with him. However, to the dismay of many of us several years ago, the UN decided to adopt the simplified form. It all began in the 20's. The May Fourth Movement was the watershed year that ushered in modern political thoughts & literature, as well as written characters & even spoken languages. The aim was to educate the masses & eradicate illiteracy which was among the highest in the world. Among the many reform plans was the simplified form of written characters. However wars broke out & everything was interrupted though not abandoned. When the communists came to power in Beijing, many of these plans were revived & put into practice. Thus we see now the establishment & wide spread use of the simplified form of characters. The reform did not stop here. Some jealots in Beijing thought that was not enough. Now they wanted to try using the English alphabet to write Chinese !
Needless to say this ended in utter failure, but vestiges remain on some books & periodicals. Here's an example; luckily, they've almost disappeared.............


Here's one I ( and many other students of the old school) grew up with during my very early days at school.(late 40's):


I consider myself very lucky to have been educated in the classic traditional way. We're a dying breed. The present simplified characters will prevail. After all, several thousand years ago, when our writing characters were being invented, they didn't look like the ones in the book above at all. They've gone through many years of evolution and refinement. They not only carry images & meanings; they've come to embody an art form no other cultures can match. In fact they have a life of their own. I just hope that many years from now, the refinement goes on to a better level than what we have now.

Robert


Tuesday, August 19, 2008 Moses Wong wrote:


Hi Everyone,

WARNING

The following program contains scenes of violence, anger, coarse language, and nudity?(you wish). The audience is advised to....
no, no, no, its the wrong script. The proper warning should be:

IF ANYONE IN THE AUDIENCE IS COMFORTABLE WITH AND FAVORING THE USE OF THE SIMPLIFIED CHINESE CHARACTERS SYSTEM, PLEASE DO NOT CONTINUE TO READ.

But - if you feel short-changed or strongly prefer the Complex Version of the Chinese Characters, I will share with you my deep, deep feelings regarding the modern Chinese writing.

(Please refrain from spitting and throwing stones at the writer)

Forgive me for being too vocal. This is an issue which has been bothering me for a long, long time; and I am sure it also bothers a lot of other people as well. This issue was triggered this morning by a scene of the Olympics announcement of a world record. The sign board flashed with the words "World Record" and in Chinese "Sze Jia Gee Lu" in simplified Chinese characters.

I take issue with that strongly that the Chinese language, since the time of the Qing Dynasty, and as we had been taught in school, uses the classical(complex) characters system. Chinese all over the world including Hong Kong and Taiwan, use the classical characters except inside China.

To say it bluntly, someone in the Communist regime decided to destroy thousands of years of culture and invented characters which are strange and unrecognizable. An ancient culture which has survived and flourished this far and practiced by the descendants of the Dragon Seeds had been brutally slaughtered and mutilated by a regime of unappreciative revolutionists.

Some typical examples include the Chinese characters of "China" or "Jong Kwok": the word Kwok is written with a "jade" inside, which is very similar to the Japanese "Kwok" with a "king" inside (for a better tie with Japan? China has forgotten how Japan molested our citizens!). Why change the sacred word of "Country"? Others such as "Factory" or "Chong" is written without anything inside an empty shell (no machinery!). So is "Kwong" an empty factory with a dot on top. (Here I wish Robert Yan can help me print out the actual simplified symbols).

There are numerous examples which have shown that the New China has utterly demolished the very basic fabrics of many years of Chinese ancient cultural beauty - as my wife fittingly refers to as: the lost of the "Bone Marrows" of old China.

I have tried to come up with a logical reasoning why this was done in the first place - perhaps for ease of learning by the populace of Chinese peasants. Not good enough! (But they might as well teach them English because it has only 26 letters to start with). But in doing so they have unwittingly wiped out the intrinsic true beauty of old Chinese language. The in-land Chinese cannot read classic books and literature. I always praise Korea and Japan for preserving much of the old Chinese writing and traditions including the practice of Calligraphy.

Try write out a poem by Lee Park in simplified Chinese and you'll see how ridiculous it looks. Jin Yong would definitely not agree with that. Confucius would be turning violently in his grave if he saw how the Communist had ruined his traditions.

My laments are if China wants to preserve the true cultural values she should never have abandoned the original traditions like they have done recently by indiscriminately bull-dozing ancient buildings to make way for the Olympics.

I am inviting anyone to give me some CONVINCING rationale as to why simplified Chinese was adopted and whether it should be accepted by all and displayed to the world as our culture. (Now we have the computer to help reverting to the original style of writing and lessen the job of hand writing). Isn't good tradition not worth keeping? When the Communist Regime took over China the very foundation of our culture was mostly destroyed. This is not dissimilar to the act of burning of books and burying alive of scholars by Emperor Qing (Fun Shu Haan Yu); and the destruction (also burning) of historic records of the Mayans by the Conquistadors of Spain. The world could be much enriched by the records if they were not destroyed by pure malice and ignorance.

I guess as long as Taiwan and Hong Kong continue to exist, the classical Chinese characters will still be maintained and used (much to the resentment of mainland China!).

Moses

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