Chinese Characters – Simplified Chinese

Simplified Chinese is a standardized way of writing modern Chinese, as opposed to traditional Chinese (also known as Traditional Chinese ). Simplified Chinese is mainly composed of heritage characters, and after 1950 the Government of the People’s Republic of China began in the mainland China region to implement the simplified characters composed. Simplified Chinese is mainly used in Chinese communities in Mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and some countries in Southeast Asia. In the past, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese coexisted in various United Nations documents.

Since the government of the People’s Republic of China replaced the Taiwan authorities and returned to the United Nations in 1971, simplified Chinese has become one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Detailed explanation

Simplified Chinese (English: Simplified Chinese, webpage language code: Zh-Hans ), traditionally uses GB2312, GBK, or GB18030 encoding (but also uses UTF-8 and other encodings), as a computer terminal is widely used on computer media, such as “Simplified Chinese version” of various software operation interfaces or documents. The ” Traditional Chinese version” (also known as ” Traditional Chinese version”, usually using ” BIG5 encoding”) is another independent Chinese version, which is incompatible with the simplified Chinese version.

” Simplified ” is the Republic of China, ” the first batch of simplified table name” used (the People’s Republic of China on the official title has always been ” simplified characters “, refer to ” Simplified Summary Table “). Due to the use of simplified Chinese software mainly for Chinese mainland users, and therefore where the “Simplified Chinese” in fact equivalent to ” GB2312 coding” or ” GB18030 code”, which means the vast majority of the software’s “simplified Chinese version of” the use of Chinese Putonghua’s Chinese character encoding, especially the translation of IT terms, is different from overseas simplified Chinese.

The official name of the official standard ” Chinese characters ” in Mainland China is ” standard Chinese characters ” (including simplified characters and inherited characters ). Simplified characters are mainly used in mainland China, Singapore, and a small number of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. As for Malaysia, major local Chinese newspapers and official texts adopt “simplified and traditional” (that is, the title is traditional and the content is simplified), while the local Chinese school teaches simplified Chinese. It should be noted that the Chinese mainland officially refers to the original character before the simplification as “traditional characters”.

Due to the confusion of terms such as “simplified characters”, “simplified characters” and “simplified Chinese”, simplified Chinese is often referred to as modern standard Chinese written in ” standard Chinese characters “. In this case, neither “Simplified Chinese” nor “Traditional Chinese” needs to comply with any local language standards. However, under the norms of modern standard Chinese, it can only be regarded as a difference in personal usage of words, not as a standard for two languages.

In mainland China, there are still some Chinese characters that have not been simplified and continue to be used. These Chinese characters that are common to traditional Chinese are called inherited characters.

Simplified language

In addition to the differences in the writing of Chinese characters (such as the differences between simplified and traditional characters, as well as the norms of Chinese character writing in various regions) between simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese, it is generally believed that there are differences in vocabulary. For example, Traditional Chinese Rideau use of ” pen ” in the Simplified Chinese multi-use ” ballpoint pen “, Traditional Chinese in the “Stalin” is referred to in simplified Chinese, ” Stalin “, Traditional Chinese in the “North Korea” in simplified Chinese, is It is called “North Korea (here refers to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea)”, and “雪梨〔Australia City]” in traditional Chinese is called ” Sydney ” in simplified Chinese.

Because of this difference, the term “simplified language” came into being. But in fact, this is not the difference between the traditional and simplified Chinese itself, but mainly because the people who use the two, especially the Chinese mainland and Taiwan in the mid-twentieth century, because of political reasons, have fewer exchanges, resulting in the difference in work habits. This phenomenon has become more pronounced since the 1980s due to differences in scientific and technological terminology. Moreover, there are also some differences in word habits in mainland China, Singapore, and other places that also use simplified Chinese. Therefore, some people pointed out that the correct formulation should be “Mainland Chinese language”, “Singaporean language”, etc., rather than “Simplified language”.

Computer use

Since Simplified Chinese is mainly used in Mainland China, the “Simplified Chinese” in the computer has always actually referred to as “Mainland China Chinese”, meaning that the “Simplified Chinese version” of most software uses the terms and Translation, this software is also popular in other communities that use simplified Chinese.

The language code of the Windows operating system usually uses ZH-CN to indicate simplified Chinese (China)

Chinese encoding

Simplified Chinese has generally used the GB 2312 published by the State Administration of Standards of the People’s Republic of China since the 1980s, as well as the subsequent GBK and GB 18030 Chinese codes. In recent years, with the emergence of Unicode cross-language code sets, it has also been widely used.

Simplified origin

The simplification of Chinese characters was carried out in the mid-1950s. Under the direct supervision of Premier Zhou Enlai, the Chinese mainland government combined hundreds of experts to simplify the font of thousands of commonly used Chinese characters. The starting point at that time should be said to be an analysis of China’s national conditions. China has experienced internal and external troubles for hundreds of years. The country is weak and the people are poor. China is also an agricultural country for thousands of years. More than 80% of the population was in rural areas. At that time, more than half of the population in China was illiterate and semi-illiterate.

On this basis, it is necessary to develop culture, build a country, and achieve literacy. An important historical task. The purpose of simplifying the text at that time was to enable hundreds of millions of people to be able to read and recognize characters as soon as possible, increase the speed of using characters, improve their cultural level, and facilitate students to study in school. This is the most basic foundation. It is possible to learn technology and build a prosperous country.

Some people in Taiwan might be surprised when they first see simplified characters. The characters in mainland China have changed so much, especially for veterans who have been away from home for decades. Seeing that their hometown has changed, their characters have also changed.

Some people hate to read simplified characters, and when they see it, they call it “Bai Shu” or “Bai Wen”. Some people even compared the text simplification movement to the haircut of the Manchu and Qing government, saying that in order to reform the people, the Communist Party forced the people to read simplified characters. In fact, it was not.

Since ancient times, Chinese characters have been written in traditional and simplified forms. In oracle bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions, the traces of simplified Chinese characters can be found. For example, “che” has multiple forms of writing. Later, more and more characters have coexisted in the two writing styles after the officialization of the seal script. From the Six Dynasties to the Sui and Tang Dynasties, Chinese characters gradually became official characters. At that time, it was perhaps for aesthetics and symmetry. Many ancient characters added strokes. Simplified characters began to be called “vulgar style”, “lowercase”, “broken characters”, etc., and they are still in civil society. Widespread.

However, sometimes there are simplifications and simplifications in the text. There are false words on Zuo Zhuan and Oracle Bone Inscriptions. When a thing we want to express is very abstract, we can’t make a character at the beginning, so we find a character that sounds close to it. By the way, when characters can be created later, there will be the original character of this abstract concept. Sometimes it was still impossible to make a character later, so one character was added with a radical, and the difference was removed, indicating that it was different from the original borrowed character. Sometimes a character gets more complicated, and people find it troublesome, so they simplify it. So in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, there was vulgar philology, that is, vulgar characters. Some characters are getting simpler and simpler, and it is not easy to see the original meaning, so I went to add strokes for them, so they became complicated.

Therefore, characters with increasingly complex strokes are definitely not less than those with increasingly simple strokes.

The complex and simplified characters existed in ancient times. Some man-made new characters were adopted later. For example, when Yang Jian was in the Northern Zhou Dynasty, he was in the rank of “Sui Wang”, but he thought that “Sui” had the meaning of “going”, so he changed “Sui” to “Sui”. Wu Zetian loves to make characters the most, she has made more than ten characters in her life. One of the characters for “guo”, she changed to “kou” with “wu” in the middle, but later felt that she was surrounded by the besieged city, so she no longer used it.