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I shall start a society for the preservation of Chinese characters...
I never got a handle on the whys and wherefores of hanzi/ kanji simplification, but I assumed it had to do with general standardization and, possibly, the promotion of universal literacy. Now I find my 1971 author blandly declaring that the Chinese government effected both simplification and pinyin as preliminary steps in the *abolition* of hanzi, and a move to a phonic western-alphabet-based writing system. (Which 1971 guy thinks is long overdue.) Was he totally on crack, as my reflexes say he must be, or is there something to this?
And I have to say, I do not get the character-hatred. The idea of reading Chinese in pinyin, even with tone markings, gives me the horrors. This is because I've read all hiragana Japanese and it's horrible. Horrible for the foreign reader, certainly; a native speaker might provide meaning and context by ear, but god knows I can't. So pace almost everyone I've read, dispensing with characters will *not* make reading easier for foreigners at all at all at all.
Also watched an hour of an NHK special on tea caravans that travel through Tibet. May rethink this taking ikkyuu business because dear god my ear (and my vocabulary) is so baaaad.
And I have to say, I do not get the character-hatred. The idea of reading Chinese in pinyin, even with tone markings, gives me the horrors. This is because I've read all hiragana Japanese and it's horrible. Horrible for the foreign reader, certainly; a native speaker might provide meaning and context by ear, but god knows I can't. So pace almost everyone I've read, dispensing with characters will *not* make reading easier for foreigners at all at all at all.
Also watched an hour of an NHK special on tea caravans that travel through Tibet. May rethink this taking ikkyuu business because dear god my ear (and my vocabulary) is so baaaad.
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Have you done the listening sections of any practice tests? My ear is bad enough that I start to tune out dramas when they get to anything more complicated than who's in love with who, but listening wasn't even my worst score on the test -- I feel like it's skewed relatively easier than the other sections.
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Have never done a listening section, partly because you have to buy the book and CD, mostly because in past level 1 challenges I knew I'd flunk the listening part and relied on the other sections to pull me up. The listening may be easier than the others but argh, too complicated for me. As witness that Eva selection last year that I had to play three times to get a notion of what was what, and that was *knowing* it was Eva.
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So there was actually two waves of simplification. The first was actually initiated by the Nationalist, and completed by the Communist in the early 1950's. The idea was that in fact many of what we think of as simplified characters already existed and were in common use by the shopkeepers and town folks-- people who aren't scholars but were still required to be somewhat literate. So the thought goes that if these commonly used alternate and simpler character were collected and standardized, it would be a big boost for spreading literacy. So this is pretty much what we know as simplified Chinese today.
There was a second wave of simplification. during the cultural revolution, which really carried it to an extreme, but then was reversed after the cultural revolution, so that's probably what your writer was referring to, and given the craziness that was sprouted during cultural revolution, I'm sure western-alphabet was not beyond them.
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... this *is* about the preservation of Chinese characters, isn't it?
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Newnham says that precisely *because* lin2 never occurs by itself, you can write it in pinyin, since the compound in which it occurs will be a recognizable word. But it'll be a commonplace word, yes. Your 2000 kanji for all reading, your 2000 words for all conversation. And I'll note that even the Japanese can't get by with 2000 kanji and must have recourse to other less common ones. The beauty of kanji, unlike any phonetic alphabet, is that you can have a guess at the meaning of an unknown word just from how it's written. Why give up that immense advantage?
The oddity is that even a basic reader can read a lot of classical poetry just as it stands. Wang Wei doesn't use hifalutin' vocabulary. What's lost to people like me is all the allusion and the context of the words themselves, the stuff that makes it poetry-- but hey, you want simple, Du Fu is simple.
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Yes, lin2 is typically combined with other characters to make it clear what it is, and yes, when they're used by themselves, you can tell usually what is meant by context, except when it's intended to be something surprising or uncommon or unexpected. But everyday life really only needs communication at the level of 5th graders, so what does it matter?
I'd like to see someone suggest that English be artificially limited to the n most common words. "Let's drop the words cerulean, azure, cornflower, beryl, cobalt, indigo, navy, royal, turquoise, and ultramarine and just go with blue, shall we? Don't bother arguing that those words have other meanings 'cause we all know none of the names of rocks or chemicals will make that "n most common words" list other than granite, marble, lead, and iron." LOL!
From my point of view, it's a serious gutting of the language and by connection the culture. Besides, it's a solution geared towards the technology of the 1900s and destroying a culture to match the technology of the "present" is always a mistake.
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destroying a culture to match the technology of the "present" is always a mistake
Precisely; as Sabina says below, MS engineers have proved Newnham wrong.
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I have some children's easy readers in Japanese which made me pine for kanji.
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Truly. Hiragana is only easy to read if you already speak Japanese.
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And in practical terms, everyone but Taiwan and older HK Chinese uses simplified now, so better learn simplified. Though of course all the Chinese newspapers here are in trad.
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Like, I can't see any logical connection between 買 and 买, which looks like it uses the same element as 头-- except that 头 is 頭. And 实, almost identical to 买, is 實. 買, 頭, 實, identical to Japanese, are easily differentiated, while I find the simplified forms infinitely confusing.
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Ditto traditional vs. simplified characters.
As in the former I like, the latter I acknowledge as are more practical (but still dislike, that's the very rational Scorpion for you :D)
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