Simplified Chinese?

The subject of traditional vs. simplified Chinese characters is of great interest to me.  It is big subject that can be approached from several angles, such as the relative aesthetic value of traditional vs. simplified characters, or the pros and cons of learning and using each system.  It is also a highly contentious subject that tends to polarize the Chinese speaking world along political lines, since simplified characters are used in Mainland China and Singapore, whereas traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and many overseas Chinese communities.

In this essay, I wish to jot down my own ideas on the subject, setting aside the issue of aesthetics, and focusing instead on the more practical aspects of traditional vs. simplified.  Specifically, I wish to answer these questions:  What are the advantages of simplified over traditional characters?  Are simplified characters significantly easier to learn, especially for non-native students of Chinese?  Finally, is the term 'simplified' a really appropriate label or a misnomer?

Why simplify?

We are all familiar with the fundamental problems of Chinese script:

• Number of characters - There several tens of thousands of Chinese characters, with a minimum knowledge of a few thousand needed to read the daily newspaper.
• Non-phonetic script - While many Chinese characters do contain phonetic elements, these also number in the hundreds, and merely provide hints of how to pronounce a character.
• Difficult to write - Writing Chinese characters is a skill that takes many years of practice to master.

Seems to me that a truly useful simplification scheme should attempt to deal with not just some but ALL of these problems.  In fact, the simplification scheme carried out in Mainland China in the late 50's and early 60's largely ignored the first two points, and focused on the last.  As Ping Chen puts it, "all that was expected of [simplification] was that it should alleviate some of the difficulty associated with use of the traditional script, and, what is more important, that it should find ready acceptance by the general public".

It's somewhat understandable that the language reformers shied away from a more fundamental reform of the script, not wanting to mess with the ancient and proud tradition of using characters, one of the pillars of Chinese culture.  Something as radical as a phonetic alphabet would surely have met with suspicion and resistance.  But speculation aside, we can make these statements about what was achieved:

• Simplified script still contained essentially the same number of characters as traditional script.
• Simplified script actually contained less phonetic information than traditional script (more on this later).
• Simplification focused entirely on the reduction of the number of strokes required to draw characters.

What did stroke count reduction achieve?

Let's consider the following example:

This example, showing the word 'art' in traditional and simplified form, might be used to justify simplification.  The simplified form (which illustrates two different stroke-reduction techniques - replacing a phonetic and eliminating a radical), looks simpler, less intimidating.

But now, consider the following list, which shows the second character of the simplified form of 'art', alongside some other characters that have entirely different meanings, but look very similar.

The point is that while simplification succeeded in reducing the structure and complexity of many characters, it did this at the expense of creating more similar-looking characters.  In other words, characters with fewer strokes are less unique, and more difficult to distinguish from other characters.

Traditional	Simplified

Consider the two paintings above, DaVinci's Mona Lisa and The Dream by Picasso.  We can draw a close analogy between these two paintings and traditional vs. simplified characters.  The paintings are similar in the sense that they both use the same ancient technique -- colored pigments spread onto a canvas -- to represent an image.  The difference is that the one on the left uses meticulous detail to maximize visual information, while the one on the left relies more on abstraction and simplicity.  In other words, Picasso's work contains fewer strokes.  The Mona Lisa is instantly recognisable, because it has more graphical details and features (such as the famous smile).  We might have more difficulty identifying the other painting, except to say that it is "a Picasso", and we may be excused for thinking that, due to its abstract nature, the painting looks a lot like many other of Picasso's works.

Let's look at some other ambiguous character pairs:

In some cases, complex traditional characters were reduced or eliminated altogether and replaced by simpler ones already in use, resulting not just in similar-looking character pairs, but characters that now carried two or more very different meanings:

Besides loss of differentiation, there are further consequences of simplification by means of stroke reduction.  According to research cited by Ping Chen, "... as far as the characters of the xíngshēng category that underwent simplification in the First Scheme are concerned, the sound-indicating value of the phonetic determinatives decreased from 0.598 to 0.324 ..."  He concludes, "the reduction in number of strokes is achieved, in some cases, at the expense of the graphic structure of the characters, making the simplified characters even less predictable in terms of sound and meaning than the complicated ones."  The xíngshēng category, in which characters are composed of a radical and a phonetic, is by far the most numerous category of Chinese characters.  Let's look at some examples of how the xíngshēng category was affected:

Here, we also see how stroke reduction was sometimes done at the expense of phonetic clarity.

Chinese in the Information Age

Back in the 50's and 60's, when the script simplification scheme was devised, times were very different.  Simplification was carried out by and was intended to serve the needs of native Chinese speakers.  Native speakers were already accustomed to using characters, and their main priority was just to make the writing of the characters more effortless.  Today, outside cultures and languages have a much greater influence in Chinese society, so alternatives such as alphabetic writing systems are more readily apparent. 

Also, the advent of the information age has significantly impacted the mechanics of writing Chinese.  Chinese is increasingly typed into a computer rather than written by hand, using input methods that often use a phonetic system to identify a group of characters, and then ask the user to choose the appropriate character from a list.  Therefore, recognition of characters has become more important as writing them has become less important.  This implies that high stroke count is no longer the obstacle that it once was, and that the loss of differentiation caused by simplification may actually make recognition more difficult, and degrade a person's ability to type characters into a computer.

Conclusions

As we have seen, the simplification scheme implemented in Mainland China in the 50's and 60's did not address many of the problems with the Chinese script, and focused instead on reducing the effort required to write characters, primarily through stroke reduction.  While achieving a noticeable simplification in the structure of many characters, this technique created some new problems, such as increased similarity of characters, and reduced phonetic information.  Therefore, readability suffered as writability improved.

Is this loss of uniqueness and increased similarity in the simplified script a bad thing?  After all, the simplified script is used by over a billion people in China.  In fact, this merely implies that people have been able to adjust to the additional demands made on them by the simplified script, perhaps by relying more on context to compensate for lack of differentiation of individual characters.  The ability of people to accommodate an inferior system should not be used to justify the system's existence.

Given the importance of language and writing to a society's development, and especially given the vast numbers of people who are subjected to the assimilation and use of Chinese characters, this writing system should continue to be studied and scrutinized from every angle and point of view.  Real simplification is inevitable, but it hasn't happened yet.

Sources:

Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics, Ping Chen, Cambridge University Press, May 1999

Chinese, Jerry Norman, Cambridge University Press, February 1988

© Joe Varadi – All Rights Reserved