On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 10:10:53 +0800, Arne GÃtje (éçè) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Traditionally the characters have been written all the same way in all > CJK areas (China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam). This is not true. The shapes of many characters used in both China and Japan diverged centuries ago. > The "correct" way to write these characters is *not* reflected by the > Unicode standard, nor by the Arphic fonts. Although DynaLab was the font foundry commissioned by the MOE to create the new standard character shapes to be used in Taiwan, Arphic also sells a font of standard character shapes the MOE would approve of. I bought my copy in Taiwan in Jan 2001. > In Taiwan, scholars and the MOE (Ministry of Education) push to write > those characters the "correct" traditional way. Not so. People think that the MOE claims to preserve the "correct" traditional way, but if you read their literature more carefully, you'll see that what they really claim to do is preserve the distinctions between character components that existed in the earliest forms, such as seal script. However, they are not consistent in their application of this principle; sometimes they'll change a character from what everyone has been writing for centuries in order to more accurately reflect seal script, while at other times they'll say, "Oh, everyone writes it this way anyway, so we're going to make this the standard." In their zeal to preserve these distinctions, the MOE has even gone so far as to create character shapes that never existed before. For example, the character å since time immemoriam has been written with å on top. But since the seal script makes it clear that the character is not derived from å, the MOE changed it to å. Never mind that the original character is not derived from å either; never mind that they are not preserving the "correct" form; never mind that the character they are promulgating did not exist a dozen years ago. The MOE has staked a claim to preserving the "correct" traditional way and has convinced enough people to believe that what they says must be correct, even if it's wrong. I don't want to get too technical here, but I can give you all sorts of information that shows that when all is said and done, any complaints the MOE has against the PRC is just the pot calling the kettle black (or as they say in Chinese, the soldier who runs fifty paces away from the battle mocks the one who runs one hundred). > The "correct" and traditional way of the most important and controverse > characters: > a) "Rain" é: The 'raindrops' in this character should not face all > downwards, but as follows: upper left one faces from left-up to > right-down, lower left one faces from left-down to right-up, upper > right one faces from right-up to left-down, lower right one faces from > left-up to right-down. > Reason: the drops represent "Water", which is written that way. This is not borne out by the seal script. The rain character is not derived from the water character. The drops in the seal script are actually perfectly horizontal dashes. The Kangxi Dictionary has the raindrops all facing down. > b) "Flesh" radical, looks similar like "Moon" æ, but the two horizontal > strokes in the middle are actually slanted, the upper one from left-up > to right-down, the lower one from left-down to right-up. This is to > distinguish "flesh" from "moon". This is by fiat of the MOE. This shape is attested to in earlier works, but it is not always this way. (I didn't look this up in my Kangxi Dictionary before coming to writing this, or I'd tell you what it says.) > c) "Bone" radical: upper part faces to the right, lower part is the > "flesh" radical and should have the middle strokes slanted, like > explained in b). Yes, the upper part has faced right for centuries. But many have written it the other way for centuries, since it's easier. > During the cultural revolution in the 1970's in Mainland China, they > "simplified" many characters. Your timing is off. Standardization of the written Chinese language on the mainland began soon after the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. It was guided by three principles: 1) Characters with competing alternate forms, such as å and ç, were to chose one shape (in this case, å). A list of alternate shapes that were declared obsolete was issued in 1955. 2) Characters with many strokes were to be simplified. The simplification process was very complicated, and I won't go into all the details here. It began as a series of lists of characters to be simplified, beginning in 1956 and continuing until 1959. In 1964 these lists were combined into the first simplified character table. The list was revised in 1988. 3) Character shapes were to be unified in order to reduce the number of components and better reflect how people write characters nowadays (in contrast to the MOE in Taiwan). This happened in the early 1960s; most mainland dictionaries give a table of "old" and "new" components. There is also a list of the correct forms for the 3500 most commonly used characters. With regards to character simplification, many are under the impression that the government just made up a bunch of characters. In reality, only 10% to 20% of these simplified characters did not exist before 1949. Most simplified characters can be traced back to the Song Dynasty, and some even to the Han. > Those simplified versions are considered "wrong" in Taiwan. However, these simplified versions are used all the time by people in Taiwan. For instance, when I was in in Taipei in Jan 2001, one of the largest cell phone companies, Taiwan Dageda, used the simplified character for "wan" in their logo. > Fonts developed in Japan and Taiwan can choose what they want, > usually it's the traditional form or a slightly simplified variant. > Arphic (Taiwan) uses a slightly simplified variant of traditional > Chinese for its Big5 fonts. As I mentioned above, Arphic also makes a font that the MOE would approve of. Theron -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
