The first set of simplified Chinese characters were first put to public use in 1956. Over time, more characters became "simplified", or existing ones changed, once in 1964 and again in 1978 and 1984. Many people did not like these changes because too many characters with different meanings were merged.
In hopes of promoting phonetic writing, the CCP was also working creating a standard romanization to accurately represent the pronunciation of Standard Chinese, pinyin. It was first taught in primary schools in 1958.
Roughly 2,000 Chinese characters have been simplified.
Today, simplified Chinese characters are used throughout Mainland China. It is also taught and used in some countries in Southeast Asia, including Singapore, and Malaysia.
Since the Republic of China fled to Taiwan and became separated from the rest of China, the government there did not choose to simplify its writing system, and so it still uses the older traditional Chinese characters. The territories of Hong Kong and Macau have also kept using traditional characters, even though they are politically part of the rest of China, which switched to simplified characters.
It could not be proven that Simplified Chinese characters were able to help people with reading and writing. As places using Traditional Chinese characters did not have literacy problems, in 2009 Pan Qing-Lin, a Chinese official, suggested to stop using Simplified Chinese characters. This did not happen.
In multi-racial societies, like Singapore, students have been learning a second language for many years. Because of this, Simplified Chinese characters are welcomed by students. People who learned the simplified set had little problem changing over to the traditional set. Even to this day, there are many reasons for the need to use traditional Chinese characters, such as working in places that did not adapt the simplified Chinese characters or reading older books that have not yet been translated to Simplified Chinese characters.
Most simplified characters have far fewer strokes. For example, the traditional character 馬 has 10 strokes, while its simplified version 马 only has 3 strokes. However, there are some simplified characters with more strokes than their traditional versions. For example, the traditional character 強 has 11 strokes, while the simplified version 强 has 12 strokes.
Below is a list of simplified characters next to their traditional versions.
There are several ways to simplify characters.
Traditional Chinese characters
Traditional Chinese characters are one of the two commonly used forms of Chinese characters. As its name shows, it is the "traditional" written form of the Chinese language that first came about during the Han Dynasty (shortly after the Qin Dynasty) in 206 BC. The name "traditional" is used to set them apart from simplified Chinese characters.
Court officials in the Han Dynasty believed that small seal script characters, which were standardized under Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi when he unified China, took too much time to write because Chinese characters at the time were written using curved lines instead of more angular lines. So Han officials decided to simplify writing Chinese characters by using multiple strokes, or lines, to form characters and radicals, rather than long curved lines. The changed small seal script characters are now commonly known as Hanzi (Simplified Chinese: 汉字 / Traditional Chinese: 漢字, meaning "Han characters"), because they were from the Han Dynasty. Hanzi became the standard writing system of Chinese and it even spread to other countries and languages. It was also used (with some differences) in the Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages.
Today, Japanese is the only non-Chinese language that still uses Chinese characters in daily life. They call them Kanji. After WWII, the Japanese simplified many of the characters. They called their simplified characters Shinjitai (which are not to be confused with simplified characters in Chinese), while traditional characters were called Kyujitai.
The older, "traditional" forms of Chinese characters remained more or less the same (although there were a few changes now and then) until the People's Republic of China (PRC) was formed in 1949. At that time, the Communist Party of China (CPC) started to create simplified Chinese characters, in which anywhere between 20-30% of all the Chinese characters used in daily life were replaced by ones that had fewer strokes and were easier to write. This move by the CPC, which took place in the 1950s throughout Mainland China, was made in order to make education more available to common people, especially farmers.
At the same time, the government of the Republic of China, which had fled to Taiwan, chose not to simplify its writing system. They continue to use traditional Chinese characters, believing that simplified characters were made to take away important details in traditional characters in order to limit thought. The Cantonese-speaking territories of Hong Kong and Macau have also kept using traditional characters, even though they are politically part of the PRC, which uses simplified characters. The Chinese taught as a second language in Southeast Asia uses simplified characters, and the government of Singapore and the Chinese community in Malaysia have adopted simplified characters as their standard script. Many immigrant communities of overseas Chinese also tend to use traditional rather than simplified characters.
Below is a list of simplified characters next to their traditional versions.
Windows Server 2008
Windows Server 2008 is the name of a server operating system from Microsoft, the previous version of which was Windows Server 2003.
This operating system was codenamed named Windows Server "Longhorn", but on May 15, 2007, Bill Gates announced its official name on Windows Hardware Engineering Conference 2007.
This operating system has several new features compared to its previous version. Many of these new features are present in Windows Vista.
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft. Introduced on April 24, 2003 as the next version to Windows 2000 Server, it was considered by Microsoft to be the cornerstone of their Windows Server System line of business server products.
According to Microsoft, Windows Server 2003 is more scalable and delivers better performance than Windows 2000.
Perry
Perry or pear cider is an alcoholic drink that is made from pear juice. Its alcohol content is around 5 to 8 percent.
Perry may contain high amount of sugar, while cider does not.
Perry is made in many countries. The countries that produce the most perry are the United Kingdom, France, and Spain.
Plate tectonics
Plate tectonics is a theory of geology. It explains movement of the Earth's lithosphere: this is the earth's crust and the upper part of the mantle. The lithosphere is divided into plates, some of which are very large and can be entire continents.
Heat from the mantle is the source of energy driving plate tectonics. Exactly how this works is still a matter of debate.
The outermost part of the Earth's interior is made up of two layers. The lithosphere, above, includes the crust and the uppermost part of the mantle.
Below the lithosphere is the asthenosphere. The asthenosphere is like a solid or a hot viscous liquid. It can flow like a liquid on long time scales. Large convection currents in the asthenosphere transfer heat to the surface, where plumes of less dense magma break apart the plates at the spreading centers. The deeper mantle below the asthenosphere is more rigid again. This is caused by extremely high pressure.
There are two types of tectonic plates: oceanic and continental.