Simplified Chinese Characters

Simplified Chinese characters (Chinese: 简体字 pinyin: jian ti zi, or less frequently 简化字 pinyin: jian hua zi), generally refer to generally refer to the Chinese characters officially simplified by the People's Republic of China government in an attempt to promote literacy. Occasionally, simplified (with respect to Chinese characters) may also be used to refer to the off-the-cuff simplifications employed in hand-writing, which classically are not official but generally widespread. This latter meaning is not the one discussed by this article, unless otherwise noted.

Chinese characters in use before this simplification are generally called traditional Chinese characters and remain in widespread use.

Distribution and Use
Mainland China and Singapore generally use simplified characters. They appear very sparingly in printed text produced in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities outside of Southeast Asia, although they are becoming more prevalent as China opens to the world. Conversely, the Mainland is seeing an increase in the use of traditional forms, where they are found aesthetically appealing and often used on signs and in logos.

For persons learning Chinese as a foreign language, instruction varies greatly: most universities on the west coast of the United States teach the Traditional character set, most likely due to the large population of Chinese-Americans who continue to use the Traditional forms. In places where a particular set is not locally entrenched -- for example, Europe, and much of the east coast of the US -- instruction is swinging towards Simplified, as the economic importance of the Mainland increases.

For overseas Chinese going to Chinese school, which character set is used depends very much on which school one attends. Not surprisingly, parents will generally enroll their children in schools that teach the script they themselves use. Descendents of Hong Kong people will therefore generally be taught Traditional (and in Cantonese), whereas children whose parents are of Mainland origin will probably be taught Simplified.

In all areas, most handwritten text will include informal character simplifications, and some characters (such as the "Tai" in Taiwan) have informal simplified forms that appear more commonly than the official forms, even in print.

A Useful Distinction?
Speakers and students of Chinese often broadly categorize Chinese characters into simplified and traditional. The latter are generally taken to be the characters used on the Mainland before simplification. While these labels are both widespread and useful, they are not strictly exhaustive. For one thing, they neglect variants specific to Japanese, Korean, and (historically) Vietnamese. Even within the context of Sinitic languages, however, character use is not uniform. While it is commonly asserted that both Taiwan and Hong Kong use traditional Chinese characters, one will find considerable variation in their respective character inventories, largely as a result of their different languages. Cantonese, the language spoken in Hong Kong, has many specific characters that are in widespread use locally, but will not be found used in Taiwan (such as 唔). Taiwainese introduces a number of specific characters as well. To get an idea of how divergent this can be, it is estimated that Cantonese employs several thousand special characters that are not widely used outside of Hong Kong and overseas Cantonese-speaking communities.

It is therefore useful to point out that when one speaks of Simplified Chinese characters, one is referring in fact to an established standard set; whereas Traditional characters can, in this context, be simply defined as characters used by speakers of Sinitic languages which have not been simplified. But even this definition is problematic, because many simplified forms of Chinese characters are actually traditional forms in their own right. A particularly useful example is 幾 and 几. While the latter is indeed the simplified version of the former, it existed prior to simplification; it simply had a different meaning. So perhaps a more accurate definition of the traditional set of characters would be: a Chinese character whose use predates the official simplification made by the Chinese government.

Origins and History
Although associated with the People's Republic of China (PRC), character simplification predates 1949. Simplified forms used in print and handwriting have always existed (they date back to as early as the Qin dynasty (221 - 206 BC), though early attempts at simplification actually resulted in more characters being added to the lexicon). In the 1930s and 1940s, discussions on character simplification took place within the Kuomintang government, and a large number of Chinese intellectuals and writers have long maintained that Character simplification would help boost literacy in China.

Advocates of simplification believed that the majority would learn to read, write and study more readily with Simplified Chinese. The People's Republic of China issued official character simplifications in two phases, one in 1956 and the second in 1964. Within the PRC, character simplication became associated with the leftists of the Cultural Revolution. Partly because of this association, a third round of character simplications, drafted in 1977, never reached the public: the authorities formally rescinded it in 1986. This simplification initiative had aimed at eradicating the ideographic system and establishing Hanyu Pinyin as the official written system of the PRC, but the reform never gained quite as much popularity as the leftists hoped.

As of 2003, the PRC does not appear either to intend to simplify characters further or to reverse the simplications already approved. The People's Republic of China tends to print material intended for Taiwanese and overseas Chinese in traditional characters. Also, as part of the one country, two systems model, the PRC has not attempted to convert Hong Kong or Macau into using simplified characters after their reversion.

Simplified Chinese characters were developed in one of three ways:

1. By reducing the number of brush strokes of a character, either by logical revision or by importing ancient, simpler variants or obscure forms. (e.g. 葉 maps to 叶; 萬 maps to 万). In some instances, simplified characters actually became one or two strokes more complex than their traditional counterparts due to logical revision.
2. Combining several complicated characters into one, simpler character (a process known as "Character Conflation"). (e.g. 隻 (a measure word for certain animals) and 衹 (variant form of "only") conflate to 只. Note that the Traditional character 只 merely replaces these two lesser used characters in Simplified.
3. Giving a new meaning to a traditional character with small number of strokes. (e.g 丰(beauty) becomes used as 豐(richly) and 余(I) becomes used as 餘(remain)). This is especially common when the character with fewer strokes is very rare or is no longer used.

Historically, characters which represented an object often appeared instead as a character for an abstract idea, while the original meaning was re-formed by making the idea even more concrete. An example of this is 然 which originally had the meaning "to burn", but its meaning changed to the prepositional "thus" while "to burn" gained the additional semantic unit of 火 -- 燃.

Pros and Cons
The effect of Simplified Characters on the language remains controversial decades after their introduction:

Proponents such as John Defrancis praise the simplification because they believe it allows lesser-educated people to read. Literacy rates since simplification have risen steadily in the rural and urban areas. Opponents argue that the literacy rates of Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan compare favorably, so simplification seems not to correlate with the improvement. Some have suggested that the bigger genealogical coherence of the traditional set might possibly even pose an advantage when learning how to write.

In the electronic age, the simplified characters have enjoyed some advantages as they are easier to read in small sizes on the computer screen and on television subtitles.

Opponents complain that by merging many characters into one, the effect "complicates" rather than simplifying the character system. Proponents point out that most handwritten Chinese uses individualized simplifications and to read handwritten Chinese one must deal with informal simplifications anyhow.

By offering a new meaning to a traditional character, some fear simplified characters jeopardise the study of ancient literature by creating a discontinuity between modern texts and literary texts. However, proponents argue that the amount of spoken and written deviation from Classical Chinese and the modern vernacular is a greater factor, and has already brought about compatibility with ancient texts.

Some complain about difficulties in translating an entire document written using simplified characters to traditional characters, because one simplified character may equate to many traditional characters. Proponents downplay the difficulty of this task, believing it merely involves some knowledge of the context of the word usage. As a result, however, direct mapping from simplified to traditional is not trivial and may requires more sophisticated techniques.

Since the simplification by pronunciation depends on Mandarin pronunciation, simplified Chinese characters become incompatible with some other Chinese dialects, as well as with other Asian languages that use Chinese characters, such as Japanese and Korean.

The Chinese characters used in modern Japanese have also undergone simplification, but generally to a lesser extent than with Simplified Chinese. Reconciling these different character sets in Unicode became part of the controversial process of Han unification.

Computer Encoding
In computer text applications, the GB encoding scheme most often renders Simplified Chinese, while Big5 most often renders traditional characters. Although neither encoding has an explicit connection with a specific character set, the lack of a one-to-one mapping between simplified and traditional sets sets up a de facto linkage.

Mainland authorities have now prescribed encoding standard GB 18030 for official use in all mainland software publications. The encoding contains all the characters of Unicode 3.0. Since Big 5 and GB characters are both included in Unicode, the GB 18030 encoding contains both simplified and traditional characters, including characters found in Japanese and Korean encodings.

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