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You jest, but Simplified Chinese came into existence because Traditional Chinese is (and derivatives like Japanese Kanji are) generally regarded as too complica
by Dalewyn 3y ago
You jest, but Simplified Chinese came into existence because Traditional Chinese is (and derivatives like Japanese Kanji are) generally regarded as too complicated.
Of course, the degree to which the complexity is disdained varies depending on who you ask: Japanese saw fit to reuse mostly as-is, Hangul chose to replace it wholesale, and so on. Simplfied Chinese is somewhere in-between, not replacing wholesale but simplifying characters often to the point of bastardization.
- nneonneo 3y agoJapanese do have shinjitai characters which are also simplified, but differently, although there are definitely fewer such characters than in Simplified Chinese. My favorite is the simplification of 龍 (dragon) - in Simplified Chinese, they took the right hand side and derived 龙; in Japanese Shinjitai, they took the left hand side and obtained 竜.
- karmasimida 3y agoChinese speakers would probably think it is 龟 instead loll
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoI learned Japanese first, and 龟 still regularly trips me up when reading simplified characters.
- throwaway2990 3y agoIt wasn’t too complicated. 95% of the country couldn’t read it write. And printing was impossible.
- yorwba 3y agoYou may want to read up on the history of printing in East Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_As...