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Ruling on Chinese Characters | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 1 of 44 20 October 2010 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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You've been granted the position of dictator of China, and you now have total control
over state language policy and the future of written Chinese. What will you do? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| noriyuki_nomura Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5341 days ago 304 posts - 465 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1 Studies: TurkishA1, Korean | Message 2 of 44 20 October 2010 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I will perhaps attempt to overhaul the written language, creating an alphabet (along the line of Korean or Japanese), though I think it's almost close to impossible...otherwise, I am fine with the simplified form of the Chinese characters...
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| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5524 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 4 of 44 20 October 2010 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, because of huge inconvenience to change the writing system, I would just keep everything the same. Not considering inconvenience, I choose going back to traditional characters.
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| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7145 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 5 of 44 20 October 2010 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Gwoyeu Romatzyh!!!
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| fireflies Senior Member Joined 5182 days ago 172 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 44 20 October 2010 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Its sort of confusing that some places (including speakers in the States in places like San Francisco) use traditional and other places use the simplified. How many charcters were altered? I would think that they might as well have kept the former system (the actual # of characters is the same?) and taught the simplified as a type of short-hand (perhaps even making it more of a short-hand for writing on paper).
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 7 of 44 21 October 2010 at 5:43am | IP Logged | ||
I think about a thousand characters differ between the simplified and traditional sets. The number of characters are almost but not quite the same, as some simplified characters correspond to two traditional, for example: 面 face and 麵 flour -> 面 face/flour 發 send out and 髮 hair on your head -> 发 send out/hair on your head These are the most common, but there are more (I suspect I've encountered a dozen or so). This makes conversion from traditional to simplified easy as cake, but converting from simplified to traditional is a lot harder. Many of the simplified characters have their origin in shorthand. Nobody writes out all the strokes in the complex traditional characters when writing by hand. A large part of the simplification process was simply elevating shorthand practices that had been in use for centuries to the status of official characters. --- As to the question, I once considered traditional characters annoying and rather ugly. I used to call them 煩體字, replacing the 繁 character (complex) with the homophone 煩 (annoying)–a pun that would be impossible with romanization, I might add. However, learning Cantonese I've both warmed up a bit to them and realized that the simplification process only took Mandarin pronunciation into account. Most characters consist of one part related to meaning and one part related to sound. The phonetic part is in many simplified characters replaced with a simpler phonetic part, but in many cases this new phonetic part, while sharing the same pronunciation in Mandarin, is pronounced differently in Cantonese. I vastly prefer Cantonese to Mandarin, so of course I'd reinstate the trads, and stop the ruthless extinction program of the other Chinese languages while I'm at it (and coerce Singapore to do the same). And I, too, would put out a press release saying that Chinese languages are not for wimps. Then I'd abdicate and hold free elections. EDIT: Big typo. I DO vastly prefer Cantonese to Mandarin. Edited by Ari on 21 October 2010 at 10:03am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6295 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 8 of 44 21 October 2010 at 7:09am | IP Logged | ||
Ouch! The memory still stings... I guess you don't get to be dictator by being nice. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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