2.3
Simplified
“With the cultural revolution they [the PRC government] wanted to break the traditional culture. They wanted to create a new culture, a new attitude. They knew that the education and letters were the foundation for their new philosophy.”11 Tommy Li
In 1949 the new Chinese government started to simplify the Chinese characters.11 After fifteen years, in 1964, they published the first set of the Chinese Simplified script. It was refined several times after the same principle. The main goal was to break complex characters down into more basic shapes and make writing more convenient. The method for this was different. For example, the traditional character for ‘noodle’ is a combination of other characters (See Figure 10a) One of them is in Mandarin also pronounced like ‘noodle’, but means “face”.11 But because of the pronunciation everything else was taken away. The result is that ‘noodle’ and ‘face’ share the same character (see Figure 10b).11 The whole simplification was very controversial especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong. There, the traditional characters are still used. Critiques feel that the characters which took 3000 years to 11 29 Since the introduction of Simplified evolve, were now crippled. , Chinese, there is an emotional debate going on in Chinese Countries, about whether the change was good or not.
a)
b)
Figure 10: Example of extracting shapes a) Character for “noodle” in traditional Chinese b) Character for “noodle” in simplified Chinese, extracted from traditional for pronunciation. Same character as “face”.
One of the main points of critique was that simplified Chinese did not evolve naturally, but was dictated by the Communist party to serve as a basis for a new culture. Many new characters were seen as being distorted in their meaning. Reforms have already taken place since the beginning of Chinese writing to create standardized characters. The intention was clear, the reforms served communication. The question is why the simplification is disliked by so many, though the new characters are indeed built of less strokes than traditional Chinese characters, what speeds up the writing process. Moreover, the shapes of the characters do not directly represent objects anymore, they are not pictographs (though their shapes originally evolved from pictographs). In terms of practicality it does not matter so much, if a character means “face” or “noodle” as long as it is understood. But reassigning it to another meaning based on pronunciation works only in Mandarin. Other languages that 26