化　境　神　似

Even Simpler Than Before

                                      

TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE against the chart below. These are all common words; most of them fall in the basic set for primary school learners (no. 14 is a bit more obscure, so I've provided a compound). Answers are provided at the end of the article, although individual characters will be discussed in the text.

So, how'd you do? Not too great, huh? I put this quiz together and I still have trouble with some of them. If the winds of history had blown in a slightly different direction, however, every last one of them would be recognizable on sight.

   The first round of simplification of Chinese characters is well-documented. Put into practice in 1956 and 1964, it caused the break between the mainland's writing system and that of the overseas community. Less well known is the second round of simplification, a draft of which was published in 1977, but which was repealed in 1986. There are several books in print that discuss this plan, but any reference to it on the web takes the form of the second half of the previous sentence. Since I have not been able to find a full list online, I've taken the liberty of scanning in the relevant pages from 第二次汉字简化方案 (the quality's not so great because the pamphlet is non-circulating - I had to scan a rather poor photocopy).

   The characters in the quiz all come from that draft. Some of them may be familiar - the first three, in fact, are quite common on rough, hand-lettered signs despite government campaigns urging standard characters. "早歺" can be seen on the door of a shack selling breakfast buns, "禁止仃车" spray-painted on a metal garage door proclaims "No Parking", and 亍 points out roads on sketched maps. Each of these characters has an older meaning and pronunciation that is simply overlooked in this folk usage: 歺 is a variant of 歹 "evil", 仃 is used in 伶仃, "solitary", and 亍 is used in 彳亍, "walk slowly". Number ten, also a folk simplification, is more widely accepted (visited Hong Kong recently?), since its base meaning, "chew" is similar to the borrowed meaning, "mouth".

   Other characters resurrect historical usage. 厶 is an ancient form of 私, "private", and 坣 is an ancient variant of 堂, "hall". 迊 is an ancient variant of 币, "coin", but here it takes its inspiration from a calligraphic form of 迎, "greet" (this usage is quite common on banners). Character 27 is based on a script form of 真, and character 28 is a regularized script form of 青.

   Characters that somehow escaped simplification under applicable rules during the first round are addressed here. The script form of 這 became regularized as 这 in 1956, so here the framers understand that 言 simplifies to文, and reduce 信 to 伩. Likewise, 套 contains 長, which was previously simplified to 长, so the secondary result is character 19.

   The 1977 plan is much more ruthless in its phonetic substitutions, eliminating wholesale those components that no longer have a phonetic relationship with modern Chinese pronunciation. Compare character 32, with 干 (gān) as a phonetic, against the original, 感 (gǎn), phonetic 咸 (xián). Or number four, 辺 (dào), phonetic 刀 (dāo), against 道, phonetic 首 (shǒu).

   Where the first simplification was basically a reduction of strokes, this round turns its attention to needless semantic components. The "radicals" in Chinese characters often have little relationship to the current meaning, anyway, so when the meaning of a certain sound is evident from context, why not do away with useless strokes? Thus 葫猢蝴糊 (hú) all reduce to the phonetic component 胡, and 菜蔡 (cài) reduce to a single character with a simplified phonetic [艹才] (see the second character of 14). Note that not all characters with identical pronunciation are so conflated; 湖, "lake", retains its original form, probably because the semantic compoent 氵 "water" is closely related to the meaning.

   Some results defy explanation. Character 18 is a simplification of 部, through what tortured logic I cannot fathom. And the prize for most obscure goes to character 20, whose traditional form is 器. The glyph itself only occurs one other place, as part of 临, the simplified form of 臨. There is perhaps a chain through 吅, but it remains one ugly character.

   Of course, ugly is relative. The entire Unicode Ideograph Extension is immense (check out the 方正超大字符集; it includes both A and B), and when I open up a character browser I often lose my way, sidetracked by the marvelous, strange, and incomprehensible. Some of the characters I can guess at - some are ancient seal forms recast in modern angular strokes, others are taken from handwritten variants. Finding alternative characters for my name is a great time-waster.

   The goal of all this is to allow scholars of Chinese to discuss historical tetragraphs in print without resorting to the ugly graphical representations I used in the quiz. Apparently this means that the slip of the woodblock-carver's chisel gets a slot, as does the effort made by a calligrapher who had just a bit too much to drink. And there is someone somewhere who will not be satisfied until there is space enough for the entire 千寿图, 万福图, and 亿操图. In a fine slice of irony, the "Four Dragons" character, cited in a footnote in John DeFrancis as an extreme example of why the current written form of Chinese is needlessly difficult and unlikely to work well in a computerized age, has been granted a slot at the far end of extension B.

   Scholars using Unicode will find themselves able to discuss the length and breadth of China's Glorious Five-Thousand Years of history, and yet there is one period about which they must remain silent: the vast majority of the characters in the 1977 simplification draft are simply not present. The first sixteen characters in the quiz are all present in a full Unicode font, although 13-16 are in the Extension space. The remaining sixteen I pieced together with eudcedit.

   The sinograph section of Unicode has always been a hotbed of political controversy, mostly in the form of nationalism on the part of Japan and the traditional-simplified struggle among China and her outlying regions. I suspect our situation here is much the same, whether through active efforts to exclude the characters, or a simple indifference. With electronic composition and transmission, scanning and indexing integral parts of current-day research, this decade-long orthographic experiment is as if it had never even existed.

   Or perhaps not entirely. A friend of mine who was in school during the proposed second simplification still uses many of these forms in her casual writing, and I'm sure she's not the only one.

Quiz Answers

1 餐、2 停、3 街、4 道、5 迎、6 私、7 算、8 建、9 酒、10 嘴、11 信、12 堂、13 宣、14 韭菜、15 影、16 款、17 量、18 部、19 套、20 器、21 儒、22 煤、23 面、24 靴、25 酱、26 鼻、27 真，28 青，29 鞋、30 察、31 整、32 感

【作者: neohet】【访问统计:】【2005年01月24日 星期一 03:59】【注册】【打印】