From: jenkinsj@blowfish.taligent.com (John H. Jenkins)
Subject: Re: Chinese character simplification, is it now necessary?
Followup-To: alt.chinese.text
Organization: Taligent, Inc.
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 22:21:25 GMT

<62175@mimsy.umd.edu><1992Nov19.173632.18435@wuecl.wustl.edu>
Organization: Taligent, Inc.

In article <1992Nov19.173632.18435@wuecl.wustl.edu>, anw1@cec1.wustl.edu
(Aaron Wong) wrote:
> 
> Well, Hong Kong pretty much gave up Chinese as far as Sci and Tech are
> concerned. We use English in almost all those cases.

When I lived in Hong Kong, I always got a kick out of this.  I would run
into Form 6 students and ask them (being a mathematician myself), "Oh,
have you studied ~{N";}7VQ'~}?"

"What?" they would invariably ask.

"~{N";}7VQ'~}."

"What's that?"

"Calculus," I would then say (in English).

"Oh, calculus!  Yes, sure, I've studied that!"

:-)

> 
> However, I do agree that the advancement of Computer Technologies will

> make this simplified/traditional arguement obsolete. That might take
time,
> say 100 years, but the popular use of computer has to happen.
> 

Unfortunately, there are two problems involving Chinese on computers
that are not going to be easy to solve.  

The first is simply the fact that the simplified characters do not map
one-to-one into the traditional ones.  This means that we're a long way
from making automatic conversion between the two sets possible.  For
characters like ~{@o~}, this may not be too bad, because there may be
enough semantic context for a computer to determine whether you mean
"inside" or "a third of a mile."  On the other hand, there are
simplified characters like ~{S{~}, where only the original author can
determine correctly whether to turn this into the traditional character
meaning "desire ardently" or the traditional character meaning "lust." 


The other problem is that to maintain compatibility with older character
sets, Unicode and ISO 10646 have been forced to include *both*
simplified and traditional characters *separately encoded*!  

If Unicode/10646 are, indeed, the wave of the future as their inventors
intend, then people in the PRC can continue to use simplified
characters and people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US, and elsewhere can
continue to use the traditional forms.  

This may actually hinder communication in the short run.  If person ~{<W~}
in the PRC sends e-mail using Unicode/10646 to person ~{RR~} in Taiwan,
~{RR~}'s computer won't necessarily know that it should try to convert
~{<W~}'s  message to traditional characters before displaying it, in
which case ~{RR~} will see a lot of characters they don't understand.  Or
vice versa.

> Perhaps we shall see a day when simplified and traditional characters
will
> be used side by side. There is no way to eliminate one form or another
by
> now. Computers will only help the persistance of both forms.
> 

Agreed!

Personally, I oppose the continued use of the simplifications.  As a
non-Chinese learning Chinese, I didn't find simplified characters any
easier to learn to read than traditional ones.  There are a few cases
where they are, indeed, easier to write by hand, but now that I have a
computer to compose Chinese on, I don't care about that any more. 
(Besides, my Chinese handwriting is pretty lousy anyway.)  

Meanwhile, for classical texts in particular, the simplifications are a
real pain.  Since I deal mostly with classical texts, I find them
*very* annoying.  (BTW, expect book one of Mencius early next week.)

Of course, I know better than to expect them to go away.  They have too
much momentum behind them now.  *sigh*

John H. Jenkins
~{>.Ww:c~}
John_Jenkins@taligent.com