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Simplified Chinese character history

People's Republic of China (PRC) period

1949 10 June10, China Character Reform Association was established.

1950 On August 9, the Social Education Department of the Ministry of Education held a symposium on the research and selection of simplified characters, and agreed on four principles for the selection of simplified characters:

Sort out and screen the simplified characters that have been used, and make appropriate supplements according to the simplified rules of the existing simplified characters when necessary;

The simplified characters selected and supplemented are mainly regular script, sometimes running script or cursive script, but we must pay attention to easy writing and printing;

The selection and supplement of simplified characters are limited to the most commonly used Chinese characters, and it is not necessary to simplify every difficult Chinese character;

After the simplified characters are selected, the Central Ministry of Education shall report them to the the State Council of the Central People's Government for promulgation and implementation.

According to the above principles, the Social Education Department of the Central Ministry of Education extensively collected information and compiled the Registration Form of Commonly Used Simplified Characters. Candidates mainly put forward some opinions on the selection principles of simplified characters, such as "the selection of simplified characters should follow the established principles" and "only a few simplified characters can be used in cursive script".

The Social Education Department of the Central Ministry of Education has reconsidered the selection principle of simplified characters, and decided to choose simplified characters in full accordance with the spirit of "words can't convey enough meaning", and pay due attention to reducing the number of commonly used Chinese characters, and try to merge characters with different forms or characters that can be used together. 195 1 year, the first simplified word list (first draft) was drawn up.

1February 5, 952, under the planning of the Central Ministry of Education, the China Character Reform Association was reorganized and merged with other institutions to form the China Character Reform Research Committee.

On March 25th, 1952, the Chinese Character Reorganization Group of China Chinese Character Reform Research Committee was established. The Chinese Character Classification Group redefined four principles for writing simplified Chinese characters:

The existing simplified characters should not be described by words, and simplified characters should not be created separately. However, if there are no common characters with simplified strokes, you may wish to find simplified characters;

Simplified Chinese characters should be printed, and their structure should be similar to handwriting. Radical simplification can be compared;

Variants are treated separately in this group, and substitutes are not included in this table for the time being;

When the list of simplified characters is published, the simplified characters are the main ones, and the comments are traditional. According to the order of the first stroke, the first stroke is the same as the second stroke, and a two-word lookup table is attached, which is simplified according to pronunciation and simplified according to traditional Chinese characters.

1952 In the second half of the year, the Chinese Character Sorting Group of China Character Reform Research Committee drew up the first draft of Simplified List of Commonly Used Chinese Characters, and collected 700 simplified Chinese characters. After reading the manuscript, Mao Zedong pointed out that these 700 simplified characters were not simple enough. To simplify Chinese characters, we should use cursive script more, find out the laws of simplification, make basic shapes and simplify them regularly.

1953 10 10/day, the Central Committee of Chinese Characters was established in China.

1954 10.8 was reorganized by China Character Reform Research Association. With the approval of the second session of the First NPC Standing Committee, China Character Reform Committee was established, which is directly affiliated to the State Council.

1954165438+1October 30th, the first meeting of the Standing Committee of the China Language and Character Reform Committee decided to make necessary amendments to the fifth draft of Simplified Chinese Characters. On the basis of the fifth draft, the Chinese character sorting group compiled the Simplified Chinese Character Draft (798 simplified Chinese characters, 400 variants to be abolished, and 25/kloc-0 simplified Chinese characters).

1955 1, China Character Reform Commission, Ministry of Education, General Political Department of China People's Liberation Army and All-China Federation of Trade Unions jointly issued a notice, and issued 300,000 draft simplified Chinese characters for comments. During more than half a year from the publication of the draft simplified Chinese character scheme to July of the same year, the China Language and Character Reform Commission received 5 167 letters and opinions from people from all walks of life, and the number of people participating in the discussion reached 200,000, of which 97% were in favor of the draft simplified Chinese character scheme (Contemporary China Character Reform, Contemporary China Publishing House, 1995).

1955 July 13 According to the proposal of the Chinese Character Reform Committee of China, the State Council established the Examination and Approval Committee of Chinese Character Simplification Scheme.

1September, 1955, the Chinese Character Reform Commission of China drafted the revised draft of Chinese Character Simplification Scheme, which deleted 400 drafts of variant characters to be abolished and the draft of simplified radicals of handwritten Chinese characters, adjusted the number of simplified characters from the original draft to 5 12, and added 56 simplified radicals. Decided not to solve the variant characters in the simplified scheme, and drew up the first draft of variant characters.

1955 10 6 15-23, the China Character Reform Commission and the Ministry of Education jointly held a national character reform conference. During the meeting, 19 simplified characters in the revised Chinese Character Simplification Scheme were revised, and one simplified character radical was cancelled. The meeting unanimously adopted the revised Chinese character simplification scheme and the first batch of variant forms. After the meeting, the China Language Reform Commission adjusted the revised version of the simplified Chinese character scheme according to the resolution of the meeting. The number of simplified characters increased from 5 12 to 5 15, and the number of simplified word radicals decreased from 56 to 54. The revised draft was reviewed and approved by the the State Council Chinese Character Simplification Scheme Application Committee.

1955, the first batch of variant forms was published.

1956 65438+1On October 28th, the 23rd plenary meeting of the State Council adopted the Resolution on Promulgating Simplified Chinese Characters Scheme.

1956 65438+1October 3 1 People's Daily published the State Council's resolution on publishing simplified Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters. Legal simplified characters have achieved the status of orthography in today's Chinese mainland.

1February 4, 964, the State Council agreed 19641October 7, China Language Reform Commission's request for instructions on simplifying Chinese characters was reported, and the State Council's notice on agreeing with China Language Reform Commission's request for instructions on simplifying Chinese characters was issued.

1964 in may, China language reform commission published a summary of simplified characters.

The output has quadrupled. Among them, the words "quantity" and "turn" have been oversimplified as homophones "two" and "anti", but these oversimplified words are still widely used among the people. 1977, 1977, on February 20th, the second simplified scheme of Chinese characters was announced, which was called "Er Jian".

1On June 24th, 986, the State Council issued the Notice of the State Council on Forwarding the Request of the State Language Committee on Abolishing the Second Simplified Scheme of Chinese Characters (Draft) and Correcting the Confusion of Chinese Characters in Society, announcing the abolition of simplified characters.

19861June 10, the simplified characters were summarized and reprinted (a total of 2235 simplified characters were collected).

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Simplify word evaluation

Historical review

In modern history, many people have made comments on the simplification of Chinese characters. Even though some viewpoints have been recognized as wrong by academic circles today, they had great influence at that time.

Since19th century, the western civilization in a strong position began to enter East Asia, and the whole Chinese character cultural circle countries set off a trend of learning from the West. Some people stick to the tradition of Chinese characters, but many people think that the use of Chinese characters should be abandoned. These arguments that the movement of Chinese characters should be abandoned are: compared with western pinyin, Chinese characters are clumsy, because at that time Chinese characters could not be written on typewriters, but had to use movable type in a huge typesetting room. Because of this, many countries that use Chinese characters have simplified Chinese characters to varying degrees and even tried to completely pinyin them. The Latin transliteration scheme of Japanese pseudonyms and the emergence of various pinyin schemes in Chinese are all based on this idea. Since the implementation of Chinese character reform, simplifying Chinese characters has been controversial.

With the introduction of western culture, the difficulty in writing and reading Chinese characters is considered as one of the main reasons for the low literacy rate in China. There is even a fierce view that Chinese characters have led to the decline of China, so it is necessary to reform Chinese characters.

Fu Sinian, the leader of the May 4th Movement, once criticized Chinese characters. He said, "Chinese characters are extremely barbaric in origin, extremely strange in shape, extremely inconvenient to understand and uneconomical in application. It's really stupid and thick, and the ghostly writing is really the most inconvenient instrument in the world. " Mr. Lu Xun once said: "Chinese characters will not die, and China will die."

Mao Zedong said during the reform in Chinese mainland in 1950s that "Chinese characters are a backward font", so "it must be reformed like Latin" to facilitate learning and recognition, so as to conform to his thought of saving the country.

In recent years, some scholars believe that if Chinese mainland is democratic enough, it may be 20 years after the implementation of simplified characters, when computers have appeared, the disadvantages of Chinese characters can be greatly reduced, simplified characters may not appear, and the cultural gap between Chinese mainland and Taiwan Province Province today and the situation that China ancient books are incomprehensible to ordinary people in Chinese mainland will not be caused.

A large number of Chinese characters that were oversimplified during the Cultural Revolution are still used by many people today, which shows that the simplification of Chinese characters can have far-reaching consequences without careful consideration.

However, many people in Chinese mainland think that the writing of traditional Chinese characters is too complicated. If the government hadn't promoted simplified characters, the literacy campaign aimed at reducing illiteracy in China wouldn't have been effective, that is to say, there would still be a large number of illiterates in China for a long time. Ironically, simplified Chinese characters have been practiced in Chinese mainland for 50 years, but compared with Taiwan Province Province, Hongkong and Macau where traditional Chinese (standard Chinese) is used, the illiteracy rate is still high. This makes people question the literacy function of simplified characters.

Nowadays, many citizens in People's Republic of China (PRC) (China) can only receive simplified Chinese character education from birth. Some people think that Chinese characters have been constantly developing and changing since their appearance in modern times, and they have reservations about the statement that simplified characters are "reformed characters" and traditional characters are "orthodox Chinese characters with a long history". At present, in Chinese mainland, people are restricted to use traditional Chinese characters only on special occasions. However, from time to time, some scholars put forward the voice of "knowing the complexity and simplifying it".

Some of the simplified characters currently practiced in Chinese mainland have caused some obstacles to reading and understanding, as well as the conversion between simplified characters. Using homonyms with simple strokes, such as "Fa", "Fa", "Hou", "Dou" and "Yu", makes a word have too many meanings and is difficult to read, especially when reading classical Chinese composed of simplified Chinese characters.

Some people think that these homophone loanwords are similar to the loanwords in the Six Books, but most of the loanwords in the Six Books occurred in ancient times. When a new meaning appears, there is no corresponding font, so we have to use homophones, that is, the loan words of "this book has no words" However, a word has too many meanings after all. After a period of time, people will create new words and separate their meanings to avoid confusion. Simplifying with homonyms with relatively simple strokes is "the original thing has its word", not an excuse in the six books. Many scholars agree that these homophone metonymies are a retrogression in the development of Chinese characters and a major drawback of simplified characters.

The modification of some glyphs is accused of being unsystematic, which makes the original words with good meaning appear to be hasty and powerless only by removing a few strokes, and cannot effectively express the original intention, such as the simplified words of "love, health, phoenix, affection and fitness": there are many Chinese characters such as "love, health, phoenix, affection and fitness".

Some of the above comments were influenced by the social environment and political trends at that time, and today scholars have pointed out their fallacies or impersonality. However, the controversy over simplification continues to this day. Today, the advantages and disadvantages of simplified characters have been recognized by scholars and the public. Please look at the next paragraph.

[Editor] Evaluation of modern academic circles

Photographed on the poster board on the campus of the University of Hong Kong. Students circle the mistakes in the exchange of complex and simplified characters and call on the relevant parties to pay attention to the accuracy of the regular characters. There have always been two diametrically opposed views on the simplification of Chinese characters. In recent years, the reflection and debate on the simplification of Chinese characters have begun to heat up.

[Editor] Agree

Those who agree with the simplification of Chinese characters think:

From Oracle Bone Inscriptions to regular script, Chinese characters have been simplified in the process of evolution. Apart from Chinese mainland, Singapore and Malaysia and other countries are using simplified characters, which is the general trend.

The simplified characters stipulated by Chinese mainland are basically from folk writing methods, and some of them are from archaism, not created out of thin air.

The simplification of Chinese characters reduces the number of strokes and Chinese characters, thus reducing the difficulty of learning Chinese characters, speeding up the writing speed, helping to popularize education, abolishing traditional Chinese characters and facilitating people's communication.

Chinese mainland's Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House and Zhonghua Book Company specialize in publishing ancient books, which are generally traditional books, so it is easy to find.

Most people in Chinese mainland who are educated in simplified Chinese characters have no obvious difficulty in understanding traditional Chinese characters.

In computers, mobile phones, PDA and other digital devices, the text size is limited, and simplified characters are displayed clearly because of their simple strokes.

Japan, which has long used Chinese characters, also has simplified characters.

[Editor] Objection

Objections mainly focus on:

The simplification of Chinese characters is not conducive to the inheritance of 5,000-year-old traditional culture in China. After the popularization of simplified characters, many modern China people can't read ancient books directly. Even if ancient books are reprinted in simplified Chinese characters, they often have ambiguity and mislead readers. What many people ignore is that since the May 4th Movement, there have been voices advocating abolishing Chinese characters and replacing them with Latin letters-this is the ideology behind the CCP's promotion of simplified characters. As the last living ideographic writing system in the world, simplified characters are only the first step to eliminate some cultures.

It is not conducive to cultural exchanges in Chinese mainland, Taiwan Province, Hong Kong and Macao, and it is further out of touch with Chinese characters used in foreign countries such as Japan, resulting in an artificial "writing in different languages". In Singapore, Malaysia and other places, the main reason is that the mainland is becoming more and more important in the world, so they adopt simplification. The so-called general trend, and the political power from the China government is still the fundamental reason. We should formulate writing norms according to our own national conditions, instead of simplifying writing step by step like Japan and other countries. Some people in Japanese society have begun to reflect on the serious consequences caused by the simplification of Chinese characters.

Simplified Chinese characters violate the six-character principle, but they do not establish a complete writing system, which greatly weakens the scientific and logical nature of Chinese characters. Many Chinese characters have lost their ideographic structure, which makes it impossible to infer the meaning of words through ideographic structure in the process of learning Chinese. At present, the deduction system of simplified characters is chaotic, and there are often exceptions or inconsistencies in analogy. What words are compared with analogy and what words are not, which is very random. Therefore, the Chinese character system is more complicated and increases the burden on learners.

The development of Chinese characters is more than simplification. For the words "you, you, you, you, longevity, you, you", Oracle Bone Inscriptions only wrote "you", which shows that Chinese characters have been in the process of diversification, and they have accounted for a large proportion in the development of Chinese characters. This is mainly due to the actual needs of distinguishing meaning, and it develops naturally, not forced by political forces. Regular script has been roughly shaped for nearly two thousand years. Saying "simplification" is the main way to develop Chinese characters, which is sloppy and too "taken for granted".

From the aesthetic point of view of calligraphy, the design of many simplified characters is not rigorous enough, and at the same time, for books such as seal script and official script, the special aesthetic feeling of the original style is lost after simplification.

Polysemy, similarity of simplified glyphs and lack of sound and meaning structure all make it difficult to recognize when reading.

Many media, such as newspapers and websites, are forced to set up two different versions of complex and simplified and/or related complex and simplified conversion tools at the same time, which consumes a lot of manpower and material resources.

When processing Chinese characters by computer, the input speed is almost the same whether it is traditional or simplified. Simplified Chinese characters are not necessarily more efficient. However, the design of simplified characters and replacement numbers increases the difficulty of computer conversion, which makes the conversion result unsatisfactory.

Simplifying Chinese characters is not directly related to eliminating illiteracy. In Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, where traditional Chinese characters are used, the illiteracy rate is much lower than that in mainland China. It can be seen that the focus of literacy work is educational resources and educational policies, rather than simplified characters.

Simplified characters created by pictophonetic characters may not be able to shoot various dialects or ancient sounds at the same time, which makes it difficult for people in some areas to understand these simplified characters. For example, the word "boat" is placed next to the word "prison". Considering the ancient phonetic system and many dialects in various places, the word "boat" is simplified, and the word "Jian" is used as the phonetic side, only taking care of Putonghua, thus cutting off the connection between the phonetic side and dialects and ancient sounds. When studying the homophonic system of ancient sounds or dialects, simplified characters are often unreliable.

Even in mainland China, traditional Chinese characters cannot be completely abolished. Not only because of the needs of ancient books and classical Chinese, but also because of the Chinese characters engraved on historic sites or buildings, which are irreplaceable. Because traditional Chinese characters are irreplaceable, and vice versa (because traditional Chinese characters can completely contain simplified Chinese characters in meaning), the appearance of simplified Chinese characters has caused the complexity of Chinese characters, greatly increased the number of Chinese characters, and caused a burden on learning.

Hong Kong and Macao continue to use traditional Chinese characters for many years after the reunification, which also illustrates some practical problems in the dispute between simplification and complexity.

When people read Chinese characters on the screen, they don't need to read every stroke carefully, but they can recognize the outline. No matter how complicated and simplified, Chinese characters can't be displayed as little as English letters, so simplified Chinese characters may not have special advantages. On the contrary, simplified Chinese characters produce a large number of similar words, which increases the difficulty of recognition in the small character environment.

Science and technology can be improved, and appropriate technology should be developed to meet the needs of Chinese characters, rather than cutting off feet.

The simplified Chinese character policy of the Communist Party of China (CPC) government is constantly changing and inconsistent. For example, the abolition of simplified characters and the re-identification of "Yu" and "Yu" as usable characters make people feel at a loss. Some common simplified Chinese characters have not been recognized as orthography (such as "Yan"), and many simplified Chinese characters are not common among the people. It can be seen that the Chinese Communist Party's statement that "simplified characters come from popular folk characters" is wrong, and the Chinese Communist Party's recognition of orthography depends on the government's preference rather than the popularity of the people.

In Chinese mainland, it is illegal to use traditional Chinese characters in official documents. The use of traditional Chinese characters in the exam will be regarded as a typo and deducted points. The use of traditional Chinese characters in shops may be exposed by TV stations or even fined by relevant departments for "using nonstandard characters", and publishing classics with standard Chinese characters must be submitted for approval. It is as ridiculous to regard the use of traditional culture as illegal as wearing a Tang suit.

Qin Shihuang's writing reform belongs to changing disunity into unity and reducing communication barriers, while the reform of the Communist Party of China belongs to changing disunity into disunity and increasing communication barriers.

Simplified Chinese characters took more than 40 years to be basically completed. In the sixties and seventies and the early eighties, the words used in books were very confusing, and simplified characters, traditional characters and simplified characters were mixed and inconsistent. Until1990s, many store names, names and advertisements written in traditional Chinese characters can still be seen on the streets of Chinese mainland. Traditional Chinese characters almost disappeared in Chinese mainland, which originated from the "Strike Hard on Traditional Chinese Characters Campaign" launched by the Communist Party of China (CPC) in the middle and late 1990s. At that time, it was stipulated that writing traditional Chinese characters would be severely punished. Under the pressure of the government, the people changed all the words on the road into simplified words. It can be seen that there is a cost in simplifying the text.

The simplification of Chinese characters is carried out under specific historical conditions. In the political atmosphere at that time, people who opposed simplified characters would be labeled as "Rightists" at any time, and there was no room for rational discussion. It caused the illusion that a large number of scholars agreed with simplified characters at that time.

Today, with the development of computers, only a few simplified words can save time. The situation of using Chinese characters in Taiwan Province Province proves that the government does not need to stipulate the standard of simplified Chinese characters, and people will naturally use simplified Chinese characters when writing.

Some ancient documents in simplified Chinese characters were discovered from the war-torn Song and Yuan Dynasties. These are mainly handwritten versions copied word by word or engraved versions printed word by word. At that time, these simplified characters, as folk characters, were promoted by the social environment at that time. This does not mean that these folk characters are scientific, logical and easy to learn. After the war, these simplified characters were not commonly used and even criticized by word researchers.

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Reprinted.

I come from Hong Kong. I have used traditional Chinese characters since I was a child. I mainly make a living by writing. I ask myself that my Chinese level is good.

After returning to Chinese mainland, I found it difficult to communicate with you. Visiting historical sites with mainland friends, friends in Weibei do not distinguish between "visiting" and "inviting"; Write a letter with an address in traditional Chinese characters. Post office workers can't distinguish between "garden" and "enclosure". I can type 60 words per minute with Cangjie input method, but I can't use Putonghua Pinyin input method. She was questioned by mainland IT technicians that "she doesn't know Chinese".

The gap between complexity and simplicity is regrettable.