Chapter 38 Chapter 11 Standardization and Reform of Chinese Characters

Chinese characters have been constantly developing and changing since the day they were produced.With the continuous generation of new words in the language, new characters continue to appear; with the change of writing habits and writing tools, new shapes and fonts are also continuously produced.These developments and changes are all products of the collective creation of the vast number of Chinese character users.These creations conform to the law of development of Chinese characters in most cases, and thus have vitality.However, it also has a certain degree of subjective arbitrariness, which causes confusion and inconvenience to the use of Chinese characters, thereby affecting the normal progress of the political, economic and cultural aspects of society.The serious "sounds of language and characters of different shapes" during the Warring States period are a notable example.Therefore, the central governments of the past dynasties have used laws and decrees to sort out and standardize Chinese characters at certain times, and at the same time, they have reformed Chinese characters to a certain extent.

The sorting and standardization of Chinese characters mainly includes stipulating the correct shape of each Chinese character and cleaning up variant characters in the same character.Qin Shihuang abolished the variants of the six countries and promoted Xiaozhuan, which was the first large-scale arrangement and standardization of Chinese characters in the history of our country.Qin Shihuang attached great importance to this work of "writing the same text" and invested a lot of manpower and material resources.Important officials under him, such as Prime Minister Li Si, CRRC Fu Ling Zhao Gao, Taishi Ling Hu Mujing, etc. all participated.When the new standard style of calligraphy—Xiaozhuan—was produced, they were immediately asked to compile such scripts as Cangjie Pian, Yuan Li Pian, and Bo Xue Pian for scholars all over the world to study and use.As he often went out for inspections, he erected inscriptions written in small seal script in various places (such as Mount Tai, Yishan, Kuaiji Mountain, etc.), of course, mainly to show off his great achievements, but also to maximize the influence of small seal script and accelerate the development of "writing with the same text". process.

The effect of this standardization of Chinese characters is obvious, it quickly ended the chaos of the Warring States period.The characters of the Chu State unearthed today during the Warring States Period are like the Chu Bamboo Slips of Yangtian Lake in Changsha (Fig. 37, left).But looking at the Western Han Silk Book "Lao Tzu" unearthed almost at the same place in Mawangdui, Changsha (Fig. 37, right). for weakened.This cannot but be regarded as a proof of the positive effect of Qin Shihuang's "book with the same text". Later, in the early years of the Western Han Dynasty, the early Eastern Han Dynasty, and since the Tang and Song Dynasties, there were records of the use of laws and regulations to organize and standardize Chinese characters.During the Xiping period of the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 172-178), the Wei Zhengshi period of the Three Kingdoms (AD 240-249), and the Tang Dynasty Kaicheng period (AD 836-840), etc., "Stone Scriptures" were engraved (Figure 38). As a standard for writing Chinese characters.

However, after finishing and standardizing work once, new changes occurred again.This is mainly due to the development of Chinese characters themselves. In the process of using Chinese characters, folks continue to create and popularize "vulgar" characters that are different from the official "orthodox" characters. Most of the "vulgar characters" are handwritten simplified or cursive characters.The influence of this kind of new characters is very great, and sometimes even official documents and specially trained intellectuals can't avoid it. Therefore, in Chinese history, the work of sorting out and standardizing the shape of Chinese characters is about every few hundred years. To do it once.

In terms of standardizing the pronunciation of Chinese characters, some work has also been done in the past dynasties.Here we need to introduce the phonetic method of Chinese characters in ancient times: for a long time, there are no pinyin letters in our country.For the phonetic notation of Chinese characters, the earliest method was to use the description of the pronunciation method. For example, the pronunciation of a certain character, some are "speaking with the tongue", some are "speaking with the belly of the tongue". Phonetic notation, such as "Xian, Yinxian", is inconvenient and difficult to be accurate.After the Eastern Han Dynasty, under the influence of foreign Buddhist culture, "Fanqie" was invented, which is to divide a Chinese character into initial consonants, finals and tones, and use two other Chinese characters to represent them respectively, and put them together to get the pronunciation of this character, such as "the same , Tuhongqie", "tu" means the initial consonant of "tong", and "hong" means the final and tone of "tong". It is recorded in today's pinyin alphabet: 吴t〔u〕+红〔h〕ong→tong tong.From the Southern and Northern Dynasties, most of the past dynasties used the form of "rhyme books" (such as "Qieyun", "Guangyun", etc.), and used Fanqie to annotate Chinese characters, thereby standardizing the pronunciation of Chinese characters.Due to the continuous change of pronunciation, many fanqie in ancient times can no longer be directly put together to form accurate pronunciation.

After the end of the Ming Dynasty, with the development of sea routes between Europe and Asia, missionaries from some European countries came to China to preach in succession. They used the Latin alphabet to phoneticize Chinese characters and learned Chinese and Chinese characters.Later, in order to enable the parishioners to read the Bible directly, some literacy work was done in a similar way. The Opium War caused the ancient civilization of China to gradually fall into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal state.Among some enlightened scholar-bureaucrats and patriotic intellectuals, there was a trend of thought for reform, reform, and self-help.A branch of this trend of thought believes that in order to make China prosperous and strong, it is necessary to "develop people's wisdom and popularize education", and the complicated Chinese characters are the biggest obstacle to this, so it is necessary to "reform Chinese characters".The "Chinese character reform" in the modern sense started from this.

This "Chinese character reform" mainly includes two aspects, one is to simplify Chinese characters.In the late Qing Dynasty, many intellectuals advocated simplified characters, and after the "May 4th Movement", a "Simplified Characters Movement" gradually formed. In August 1935, the Ministry of Education of the then National Government officially announced 324 simplified characters after the "Decision of the Executive Yuan Meeting" and "Approval of the Central Political Conference".The selection criteria for this batch of simplified characters are: (1) the principle of following the description but not writing; (2) choosing the simplified characters that are more popular in the society and adopting them first;This batch of simplified characters was not implemented for some reason.

In the liberated areas led by the Communist Party, many simplified characters were determined, created and adopted during the literacy and cultural popularization campaign.The second is to promote the pinyin of Chinese characters.Around the beginning of this century, there was a "Qieyinzi Movement". Some enthusiastic people once proposed more than 20 kinds of Chinese character phonetic schemes.By 1913, a set of "Phonetic Alphabets" was formulated and promulgated by the then Ministry of Education in 1918.This set of phonetic alphabets includes 24 initials and 16 finals, most of which use the radicals of Chinese characters as their shapes.This set of phonetic alphabets is still in use in my country's Taiwan Province and other regions. Since 1930, a "Latinized new script" has also been produced in some areas and among the masses.

After 1949, the people's government attached great importance to the popularization of cultural education and the reform of Chinese characters, and specially established the "Chinese Characters Reform Committee" (now renamed as the "National Language Work Committee") as a special agency for the reform of Chinese characters. In 1958, Premier Zhou Enlai of the State Council put forward three tasks for the reform of Chinese characters: 1. Simplify Chinese characters; 2. Promote Putonghua; Under the impetus of relevant government departments and academic institutions, these three tasks have made great progress and achieved certain results.

Simplify Chinese characters, including simplifying the strokes and word counts of Chinese characters. In January 1955, the "Chinese Character Simplification Program (Draft)" was announced, and it was passed by the plenary session of the State Council the following year.After eight years of using printed and written documents, books, newspapers and periodicals across the country and teaching practice, in February 1964, the Chinese Language Reform Commission compiled and printed the "General List of Simplified Characters", based on the "Chinese Character Simplification Scheme", for the The simplified words and simplified radicals have been adjusted and analogized, and are divided into three tables: the first table has 352 simplified characters that are not used as radicals; the second table has 132 simplified characters that can be used as radicals and 14 simplified radicals; The third table has 1754 simplified characters derived from the simplified characters and simplified radicals of the second table.These three tables have a total of 2238 simplified Chinese characters.The strokes of these simplified characters are reduced by nearly half compared with the original traditional characters.

The simplification methods for Chinese characters in the "Chinese Character Simplification Scheme" are as follows: 1. Retain the outline of the original character, such as replacing "鹁" with "豪" and "思" with "思"; 2. Replacing the whole with parts , such as replacing "医" with "医" and "声" with "声"; 3. Replacement of the parts of the pictophonetic characters, such as replacing "早" with "医" and "抱" with "抱" is to replace the phonetic symbols , substituting "jaw" with "palatal" and "cat" with "猫" are replacement pictographs; "; 5. Change phonetic characters to non-phonetic characters, such as "Zao" instead of "Zao", "tears" instead of "tears"; 6. Homophone replacement, such as "Li" instead of "wrap", and "ugly" 7. Borrow ancient styles, such as replacing "cloud" with "cloud" and "dust" with "dust"; 8. Regularization of cursive script, such as replacing "dong" with "dong" and replacing "book" "Book"; 9. Substitution of marks, such as "Huan" for "Huan" and "Yi" for "Xi".etc. Some of these methods overlap in some words, but generally speaking, they are all created by the masses in history, and "have existed since ancient times". The measures to reduce the number of Chinese characters are mainly reflected in two aspects. One is to replace words with many strokes with homonyms with fewer strokes, such as "face" instead of "mian" and "mian" without causing confusion in modern Chinese. Shen" replaces "Shen", "Yu" replaces "Yu" and so on.This not only reduces the number of words, but also simplifies the font.The 2nd, carry out the cleaning of variant characters, eliminate the phenomenon that many Chinese characters have two or more shapes. In 1955, the Text Reform Committee and the Ministry of Culture jointly published the "First Batch of Variant Characters Arrangement Table", abolishing 1055 variant characters. To a large extent, the promotion of Putonghua and the formulation and implementation of the Hanyu Pinyin program are closely related and mutually reinforcing. In February 1956, the Text Reform Committee published the "Chinese Pinyin Scheme (Draft)" based on the previous Zhiyin, Fanqie and various pinyin schemes.There are three basic principles for formulating this plan: First, the Beijing dialect is used as the pronunciation standard.That is, what it spells is Mandarin with Beijing pronunciation as the standard pronunciation.The phonetic notation in dictionaries, reading materials, and textbooks must be based on this pronunciation.This creates good conditions for the promotion of Mandarin.The second is to use phoneme as the syllable structure.We know that a Chinese character is a syllable.The so-called "phoneme" is the smallest unit that makes up a syllable. For example, "Ma" is composed of two phonemes, m and a, and "Gone with the Wind" is composed of four phonemes: p, i, a, and o.The third is the Latin alphabet as the letter form.Because the Latin alphabet is the most common alphabet in the world and an international text symbol, it has simple strokes, clear configuration, and is easy to write. In February 1958, the National People's Congress approved the "Chinese Pinyin Program", which replaced the Chinese-style phonetic alphabet announced in 1918. It must be explained that the function of the "Chinese Pinyin Scheme" is firstly to annotate Chinese characters, and it is not a pinyin text that replaces Chinese characters.It is a tool for spelling Mandarin and promoting Mandarin. The "Hanyu Pinyin Scheme" can be used as the common basis for the creation and reform of writing by various ethnic minorities in China.It can also help people of ethnic minorities and foreigners learn Chinese, so as to promote political, economic and cultural exchanges at home and abroad.In addition, the "Chinese Pinyin Scheme" plays an effective role in the fields of computer (computer) input of Chinese characters, information processing, telecommunications, transliteration of Chinese and foreign names and place names, and compilation of book indexes. In 1982, the "International Organization for Standardization" (ISO) was voted by all member states and decided to adopt the "Chinese Pinyin Scheme" as the international standard for Chinese Roman alphabet spelling, numbered "ISO-7098".This means that the "Chinese Pinyin Scheme" has been officially recognized by the international community, so it will have more vigorous vitality and play a greater role.