“Spelling reform” in China:
For better or worse, Mao Zedong usually came out on top, whether facing Japanese invaders, nationalist warlords or Communist Party rivals. But for all his success in overturning traditional values and institutions, the founder of modern China came up short in his desire to convert written Chinese from its character-based system to an alphabet. Intellectuals resisted fiercely, some out of the belief that China’s writing system was superior to any other, and unified a land of many dialects far better than a phonetic system, others on simple sentimental grounds.
Many claimed it could not be done, despite the examples of Korea, which managed the trick in the 15th century, and Vietnam which, like China, has a tonal language with many homonyms but switched successfully to an alphabetic system. In the end Mao settled on a halfway step: cutting the number of strokes in some Chinese characters (from 18 to four in the case of feng, which means “abundant”, and is shown above). This set China apart from Hong Kong, Taiwan and most overseas communities. Many purists thought simplifying characters as appalling as eliminating them.
That fierce debate is now being rekindled with the government’s announcement of plans to issue later this year a new list of character modifications, aimed mainly at correcting certain “oversimplifications” undertaken in the past. Some characters will have more strokes added and thus be brought closer to their earlier, more complicated forms. But officials insist the move does not mark the start of a campaign to scrap simplified characters. China, they say, need not move back toward the traditional forms, nor further along the path of simplification. It simply needs to “standardise” things.
This will disappoint Pan Qinglin, a member of the consultative committee that advises China’s government. In March he submitted a proposal to the government calling for a return within ten years to the greater expressiveness and “artistic quality” of the traditional script. Others, however, will be pleased, including the internet commentator who recently compared reviving traditional characters to “asking women to revive the practice of foot-binding”.
Other arguments focus less on deep issues of cultural identity than on practical concerns, such as how hard the new forms will be to learn, how much it will cost to convert signs, replace textbooks and adapt software, and whether the government will pay for the changes. Mao famously argued that “revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture”. It might, however, be reforming orthography.
I don’t think that’s such a good idea. We’re already trying to simplify too many things in life, thus contributing to the “dumbing down” of society almost everywhere.
One only needs to look at the “German spelling reform” several years ago, which in my view has been a total disaster. Today, German spelling is all over the place, and only very few people actually know the proper rules of spelling these days.
Years ago, I had to learn around 2,000 Chinese characters (i.e., the most basic ones used in Japanese), and it wasn’t very easy in the beginning. But once you get used to this way of writing, learning new characters – including those with a large number of strokes – becomes easier with each new one. At least, this has been my personal experience.
For me, and I’m still trying to find the time to learn Mandarin, it would be highly unfortunate if China decided to “dumb down” its script. Where’s the fun in simplified characters?
Hello. I'm in a situation somewhat like yours. I'm a native English speaker, fluent in Japanese (with 漢検２級) with an interest in Mandarin (I've been studying for a few months). I had the following thoughts on your post:
As the article itself said, they aren't simplifying things any more than they already did many years ago; in fact this time they're partially undoing some of the simplification. So I don't see how anything is being "dumbed-down" any further than it already has. (And you really missed the boat on that one!)
The "fun" in simplified characters is a writing system with 99% of the expressive power of traditional characters, but 50% with less visual clutter and easier to memorize and write. (These numbers are entirely made up.)
I've had the "traditional vs. simplified" debate with a lot of people, and the argument against simplified usually comes down to "I already know traditional, and I just don't like simplified." In my opinion simplified is significantly easier to learn, and if you have no previous knowledge of kanji then by definition you won't be "missing" anything (people always complain about, e.g. 麵 being reduced to 面; but if you didn't know 麵 to begin with then it's no more problematic than English having two meanings for the word "right"). And the aesthetics are completely relative; I happen to think simplified characters look just as elegant as traditional ones.
Just my $0.02.
(P.S. My Mandarin study materials are all in simplified, but I'm also making an effort to learn traditional since it's so much easier for me to go to Taiwan than to mainland China.)
Posted by: Aaron | July 05, 2009 at 09:59 AM