Chapter 21 Section 4 Traditional and Simplified Chinese

Traditional and simplified characters are the same character. When written, there are more or less strokes. Those with more strokes are called traditional characters, and those with fewer strokes are called simplified characters or simplified characters. As long as it does not become another character, the strokes of the same Chinese character are more or less common, for example: chaos-chaos, (upper opening and lower opening)-Qi, Qi-Qi, net-net, etc. The phenomenon of complex and simplified Chinese characters is often encountered in oracle bone inscriptions. For example, the character "star" used to have five small openings in the early days, and sometimes only two were written, which is a simplified character.

Among the different calligraphy styles of Chinese characters, the phenomenon of complexity and simplicity is even more common. For example, cursive script can be said to save strokes to the greatest extent. Later, many cursive script forms were absorbed by running script and regular script, and became popular in the society. For example: special - special, book - book, horse - horse, etc. For the convenience of the general public in learning and using Chinese characters, using the power of the government to consciously promote simplified characters on a large scale is a common occurrence in all ages, especially since entering modern society.This point will be specifically introduced below.

There are various relationships between the simplified characters that have been used since the 1950s and the corresponding traditional characters. Here are three preliminary points: The first type, traditional and simplified characters are one-to-one, relatively simple, such as: love-love, pen-pen, strike- strike, Xi-xi, etc., which can be said to be the majority. The second type, although the traditional and simplified characters are one-to-one, the unique usage of one side cannot be replaced by the other. For example: cloud-cloud can be used for "cloud", but "cloud" in "Ziyue Shiyun" cannot Writing "cloud"; after - after, can be used for "front and back", but the "after" of "queen" cannot be written as "after"; dry - dry, can be used for "clean", but "dry [qianqian] kun" "干" cannot be written as "干".

The third type is that traditional and simplified characters have a many-to-one relationship, and multiple traditional characters cannot be used or confused, for example: Dang-Dang (should), Dang (onomatopoeia), altar-altar (earth platform), altar (pottery), Fat —fa(launch),fa(hair), dry—dry(shield), dry(clean), dry(trunk), dry(energy), etc. The above-mentioned phenomena about orthodoxy, ancient and modern, different forms, and complex and simplified are all common occurrences in the history of the development of Chinese characters, and they are also common in ancient books and modern documents, so they are necessary knowledge for understanding Chinese characters.However, as far as these terms are concerned, they are often just investigations and explanations of the same phenomenon from different angles, and they inevitably overlap each other. The traditional characters of the ancient characters (as far as they can be used); between the variant characters, most of them are different in traditional and simplified writing.And so on, it is not difficult to understand.