Traditional and Simplified
I'm often asked whether I can speak and read Chinese. I usually respond with a simple, "yes, sort of". The real answer, should anyone be so foolish to indulge me, is far more complicated.
First of all, what is meant by Chinese? Many foreigners without experience in the country think of China as having two main languages, Mandarin and Cantonese. They assume both languages exist side-by-side, and so when asked if I can speak Chinese, a follow-up question is often "Mandarin or Cantonese?".
To clear up confusion, what we call "Mandarin" in the West is actually the national language of both the People's Republic and Taiwan. This language developed as a lingua franca of several northern and southwestern dialects and was eventually promoted as the national language in the 20th century. The Chinese refer to it as "common speech" and use of the tongue is mandatory in all schools. Except in remote rural areas, most Han Chinese speak and understand Mandarin and many use it to the exclusion of all other languages.
In addition to Mandarin, countless languages and dialects exist in China. Cantonese is merely the best known of these, due to its use in Hong Kong and in Chinese diaspora communities throughout the world. On the mainland, few people outside of Guangdong Province understand Cantonese.
The vast majority of Chinese dialects and languages belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family, with the main exception being the Turkic Uighur language spoken in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang. That being said, a Kunming native would not be able to understand the Shanghai dialect at all, and vice versa. To remedy these gaps in communication, the Chinese government has long insisted Mandarin be exclusively spoken in schools and business settings.
With spoken Chinese out of the way, let's consider the written language. Originally, all Chinese languages (with the notable exception of Tibetan) were rendered in traditional characters. These characters are also widely used in Japan, and once in Korea and Vietnam, too.
In the early years of the People's Republic, Mao Zedong authorized the simplification of many Chinese characters in an effort to boost literacy. He reasoned that traditional characters were too complicated for peasants to learn, and in fact he seriously considered junking characters altogether in favor of an alphabet. For a variety of reasons, characters survived- but not traditional characters.
Simplification was not without its controversies, and several elite critics of Mao's edict found themselves in deep political trouble. Hong Kong and Macao, then controlled by the British and Portuguese respectively, maintained traditional characters, as did Taiwan. Only Singapore adopted Mao's modifications to the written language. These differences persist to this day.
After reform and opening, traditional characters became fashionable on the mainland, and many restaurant signs and advertisements now use them for aesthetic effect. Most educated Chinese have learned to read them, and I suspect that an effort to revert back to the old written system would have much popular support. Citizens in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao have fought to protect traditional Chinese in international settings, as organizations such as the UN adopted simplified characters after recognizing Beijing as China's legitimate government in the 1970s.
If I were running China, I would seriously consider reverting back to exclusive use of traditional characters. After all, there is little evidence that simplification has aided literacy (when controlling for other variables) and little reason to suspect it would. Plus, China's long-term strategic goal is to unify Taiwan under Beijing's control, and projecting an image of "One China" would be easier if the whole of China again used the same script.
Or for purely selfish reasons, it would make those pesky Hong Kong karaoke video subtitles a little easier to read.
February 12th, 2008 - 01:16
On the one hand, I wouldn’t mind either. I don’t they are really that much harder and yes, they just look cooler.
For a more practical reason, however, I’m not too fond of ç¹ä½“å—. The characters are barely decipherable on the web without increasing the text size. Simplified is bad enough.
February 12th, 2008 - 03:33
Hi Matt,
Just want to say a couple of things:
(1) In addition to Uighur-Turkic that the Uighurs speak, there are a few other languages that also belong to to the Altaic language group: namely Kazak, Uzbek and various other Central Asian languages found in China, Mongolian, Korean, Manchu, Xibe etc. Also, some minorities in southwestern China speak languages that are not part of the Sino-Tibeto language group.
(2) Not just the Tibetans have different scripts/characters. The Uighurs, Kazaks etc. use some something that looks similar to Arabic. Both the Mongolians and the Manchurians (albeit very few in number) use Mongolian script. Ethnic Koreans of course use Hangul.
(3) Simplification of Chinese characters is not new. Actually many of the simplified characters adopted by the Chinese government were taken from ancient texts, including period calligraphy.
(4) I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree with you that China should switch back to the traditional characters. They look better. More sophisticated. It would be a shame for Chinese kids who are only taught simplified characters to be enable to read original period texts.
February 12th, 2008 - 08:12
Pfeffer,
Thanks for the corrections. I should have done a more thorough (read: Wikipedia) check before writing.
Jason,
Good point about computer renderings. I wonder if the 50 million or so people who use traditional characters have complained about their language being too difficult to read on a screen?
February 12th, 2008 - 18:50
As for computer renderings, I often find simplified hard enough. It shouldn’t be my eyesight, though, I got new glasses only six months ago…
Also, romanisation is not as new as you think. It was promoted way before 49 by several prominent intellectuals. Lu Xun would be the most famous, I think. Of course, several competing systems were bandied about (Wade-Giles, Yale, Gwo-yu Romatzyh (spelling on that last one????) before the Communists invented Hanyu Pinyin, and there’s still several competing versions fighting it out on Taiwan (but that seems to be a very heavily politicised battle, with Greens being viscerally opposed to Hanyu Pinyin- for its Mainland origin, perhaps?). Also, the BoPoMoFo (it has a more official name, but I can’t remember) system used on Taiwan is another competing system for phoneticising Chinese writing.
I also mostly agree with Pfeffer’s corrections, except that I would point out Manchu is all but dead (there are a very few surviving native speakers, all ancient, all in remote Dongbei villages), although it is preserved in written form in Qing Dynasty court documents, as well as on many inscriptions and plaques on buildings around Beijing- Yonghegong/Lama Temple is very interesting for having all its plaques in Mongolian, Chinese, Manchu and Tibetan. Oh, yes, Mongolian and Manchu have their own, distinct scripts.
Oddly enough, the Mongolian script is only used in China these days. Mongolia itself converted to Cyrillic after it went Communist- it was a Soviet satellite state, remember.
I disagree with a return to Traditional, though. Sure, it would likely have no impact on literacy rates. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau have literacy rates equivalent to those of Western, developed societies, as does Japan (with three scripts to learn, one of which is Chinese characters slightly modified), which would suggest the key is access to education of a sufficient quality, something that Mainland China still needs to do some very serious work on. However, I don’t see any kind of aesthetic superiority to Traditional.
As for KTV or cutting Chinese kids off from ancient texts, Chinese people seem to deal with KTV well enough, and I’ve noticed myself that context can do a lot for helping me to at least recognise traditional forms. Simplified won’t see an abandonment of Traditional, as you, Matt, noted with the reappearance of Traditional on things like shop or restaurant signs, because there will always be a movement to preserve Traditional, even if it is for prestige or economic purposes. And besides, so long as young kids are learning calligraphy, they’re learning traditional forms (note the plural) of Chinese characters.
As for cutting Chinese kids off from the original texts of China’s cultural heritage, Pfeffer: Tell me, how many educated Chinese can read seal script or oracle bone characters? Comes a point when too much time has passed and the original texts need to be translated into the modern language. You can easily see the same with English: Precious few native English speakers can read Beowulf in the original. I know I can’t. Most struggle with Shakespeare, and even then seriously misunderstand many key passages (how many think “wherefore art thou Romeo?” means “where are you Romeo?” when it actually means “why are you Romeo?” Sure, a knowledge of other Germanic languages would probably help people translate ‘wherefore’ correctly from the Early Modern to Modern English- Norwegian hvorfor and German wofur are essentially the same word, but most native English speakers don’t have that knowledge). Alright, I’ll stop rambling so incoherently: My point is all living languages are in a constant state of flux. Chinese is no different. Actually, the Tradtional characters we have now are relatively recent forms, and Simplified has gone through at least three versions, and the second to last version simplified some characters far more drastically than the current standard. And some of those super-simplified characters can still occasionally be seen- é¤ replaced with only its top-left radical is a common example.
Sorry, said I’d stop rambling. Stopping now.
February 12th, 2008 - 19:33
Actually, your ramblings were extremely interesting and insightful, Chris- thanks.
February 12th, 2008 - 20:09
You know, I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not…but this is the internet, so it’s likely.
Either way, to be clear: I think it’s more of an issue with English language websites that use characters as well. The default English text size is far too small for Chinese.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen ‘facebook’, but using Chinese on there is a mess.
A simple google search in Chinese, not so much.
February 13th, 2008 - 03:18
Chris,
I was not referring to deciphering oracle bone characters (甲骨文), I meant reading some ancient texts and calligraphy works etc that were done in traditional characters (which changed little since Qin dynasty).
I never considered rendering traditional characters a problem. Try this:
我认为电脑显示ç¹ä½“å—没有任何问题。
我èªç‚ºé›»è…¦é¡¯ç¤ºç¹é«”å—沒有任何å•é¡Œã€‚
Chris, what do you mean by “the Tradtional characters we have now are relatively recent forms”?
February 13th, 2008 - 09:31
Pfeffer, language changes over time, that’s all I meant. I’ve seen many inscriptions done in older forms of the characters that, even though the characters themselves are reasonably clear, are extremely difficult to decipher.
Jason, you may well be right, and I find Pfeffer’s examples above actually quite easy. Even so, I do often find myself squinting, or copying characters into a word document and enlarging them, sometimes including on Chinese language sites or applications. Maybe my eyesight is also a problem.
February 13th, 2008 - 14:35
I’m not purporting that it’s impossible to read traditional characters on the internet.
It is hard not to notice that if you go any smaller than that, characters need to be ‘blurred’ in order to distinguish stroke marks on a single character. (Traditional and simplified alike.
I will not stand for such squintage.
February 27th, 2008 - 01:37
These are very interesting comments. I seem to agree with most of them.
Maybe it’s because I learned traditional characters exclusively in NYC through Sunday school, that’s why I’m partial to traditional characters. However, realistically, I think it’s almost impossible to fully revert back to an exclusively traditional character set. Any kind of movement most likely will result in some hybrid state of the status quo, though that may not be a balanced 50-50 hybrid.
In recent years, I’ve noticed an increase in simplified characters on notices and bills around NYC. It’s funny how some companies advertise in traditional text on most streets and in simplified text on select streets. I suppose it can be attributed to the source of today’s Chinese immigrants–mainland China–and their neighbourhood of abode. I can only hope that in an effort to communicate with these immigrants, traditional characters don’t get displaced from being the de facto standard. So far, at least, the Subway notices still use Traditional characters.
Speaking as a Chinese instructor, I definitely recommend that students study traditional characters coupled with pinyin first. I find that it’s enough to be able to recognise the simplified version afterwards. It’s easier to see how the character was picked apart to develop the simplified form this way. Perhaps other people may argue differently: simplified characters are easier to write, so learn those first and then learn to recognise the traditional form second. I guess I’m not wrong, and they’re not right either.
Lastly, I agree about the low-legibility of characters on webpages these days. I definitely find myself holding Control and dialing the scroll wheel to increase the font size. I definitely don’t think it’s unique to either set of characters. Chinese web-page designers should start setting the default font size of characters to a larger size. Then again, it’s probably much easier said than done.