TO SIMPLIFY OR NOT
TO SIMPLIFY OUR CHARACTERS?
It depends on how much you cherish the Chinese characters, both the
written and personal kinds. The Japanese and Koreans, for
example, disliked the written kind so much out of strong nationalism,
that they replaced it with a westernish kind. They, in essense,
cut
off their cultural roots by abandoning the written characters that had
defined their personal characters for thousands of years.
Simplifying the characters is a self-propelling phenomenon that lead to
compromising other culture values. The most significant could
just be the embracing of the short-sighted, quick payoff of simplifying
the characters. Other phenomenon includes the infamous religious
cult, farenkung, which was able to emerge from the cultural vaccum
created when the cornerstone of culture, the language, had been
loosened. Ironically, as any typical boomerang effect has it,
it's
that very protesting of the simplification by farenkung has given
legitimacy
to an otherwise mumble-jumble, politically structured,
religious group of lost souls.
A popular illustration of transformation from the traditional to a
simplified character is with the word,義 , for righteousness. It
has been simplified and thus arrogantly trashed to,义. But the
original form is a lamb,羊 ,
above the word I,我 . It tries to say: " I am willing to be
sacrificed myself as a lamb (for a worthy cause)." This happens
to be
the second most treasured characteristics of a cultured person, next
only to,情 , emotion.
Breaking down further, we see the word lamb,羊 , is the word for king,王
,
adding two horns and a tail. How precarious the position of king
now appears. This symbolism should go a long way in pacifying
westerners' whining about centralized and authoritative powers that
have been preferred in China.
And the word I,我 , is just: "I am someone with a hand( )
carring a plow(戈 or sword?). A simple accounting shows that we
learn
a half dozen words in one shot, while, in so doing, travel deep and
wide in time and space.
Granted that it would take special courage for any Chinese leader to
take the unpopular stand of reviving the traditional characters.
Let's hope China would grow strong and wise soon enough to take this
critical step.
In the new global game of image building, a nation with two languages
gives off an image almost as bad as a nation that is under one god.
Liaozixiansheng
The use of the simplified
characters does not make it easier for people to learn Chinese, IMHO.
It is not the number of strokes in a character that determines the
initial load on the brain's working memory [when the character is new]
and associative capacities [which involves the transference from short
term to long term memory] per se. Ultimately, it is whether that
character can be related to past characters, or the number of
associational cues it brings to mind, that determine how easy it is to
learn.
More strokes does not mean more difficulty. Less strokes could mean
more difficulty if the visual presentation of the character does not
contain enough 'cues' to alert the reader as to the meaning.
It is folly to ascribe the massive rise in literacy to the
simplification of Chinese characters. After all, Taiwan and HK had
similarly high literacy rates despite using traditional forms.
The only real reason for the rise in literacy must then be due to the
improvement in the quality of the education and in the larger numbers
of people enrolling at public schools.
Chang
Choon Chiao
Date: 02-28-06 20:06
I have read some interesting articles on the revival of the
traditional written Chinese characters. I am quite convinced by the
arguments. The imput of Chinese characters into computor are now done
in two mode, by phonetics or by the 'brush strokes'. As we all know the
phonetic imput mode is difficult to improve upon to increase the speed
of imput. There are simply too many characters having the similar
phonetics and Chinese of various dialect groups pronounce the character
differently.
In the 'brush stroke' mode the speed of imput can be increased with
more differentiation. The simplified character system actually results
in reducing differentiation and this slow down the process of keying in
characters through the key board. Maybe you can start a thread to
inform us what progress you have made in this area.