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In particular, there should be many examples of 形声字 ("phono-semantic compound characters") which were "damaged" by simplification. I am interested especially in characters where a 声旁 ("phonetic") or 形旁 ("signific") was partially removed in such a way as to provide misinformation.

To illustrate,

  • 盤 was simplified to 盘, leaving a pointless 舟 at the top instead of a 声旁/phonetic.
  • More obscurely 勝 (etymologically 朕+力) was simplified to 胜, leaving a pointless 月 instead of the semantically helpful 力.

Does anyone know of more examples like these?

(Note: this is not intended as an anti-简体字 post!)

dROOOze
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Colin
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  • I like this question, but it is too broad. You can list almost any simplified character and point out the negative effect of taking out some essential element. Please narrow the question down. – Tang Ho Oct 29 '16 at 19:11
  • I edited it to make it explicitly about 形声字 (as this was my intent). I think there will be many correct examples, but not just anything works. For instance, 遠 －－》 远 and 彈 －－》弹 are not correct answers, because in these cases, useful elements were replaced with useful elements, preserving the 形声 structure. – Colin Oct 29 '16 at 20:40
  • Even after the editing, the question is still too broad, a user could list a hundred characters and another user could list another hundred. The main problem is, you already know enough to list a few examples, which means the goal of this post is to seek confirmation from other users. Your examples already illustrated your point- "simplification damages characters" and I agree. – Tang Ho Oct 29 '16 at 20:52
  • I narrowed it a bit more. The point of of the question is not to seek confirmation that some characters were damaged by simplification (as I agree with you that is obvious), but to isolate a good number of examples of this happening. If you think there are hundreds of examples, great! It should then be easy to provide a list of 15 good ones and I can accept that answer. – Colin Oct 29 '16 at 21:00
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    My position on simplified characters vs. traditional characters is - It is the current standard, people have to accept and use it in daily life unless the system is changed; However, Chinese people should also learn the traditional characters as a useful language skill. – Tang Ho Oct 29 '16 at 21:01
  • (I believe the question offers clear criteria for what constitutes a good example. If there are many such examples that just means it's an easy question) – Colin Oct 29 '16 at 21:02
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – Colin Oct 29 '16 at 21:04

3 Answers3

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for 形聲字, the simplification made severe, unrepairable damages to the chinese culture.

for example, the character 難(u+96e3); it's composed by the 172th radical 隹(u+96b9); and the component (u+26c29), that's a phonetic component, which was shared by numerous characters.

the 說文解字 stated: 難　鳥也﹒從鳥﹒堇聲

while 堇(u+5807) is a character since oracle script, enter image description here; later, it's derived to 堇(u+5807)

& (u+26c29)enter image description here

back to the phonetic component 堇. in cantonese, 堇 is pronounced as gan2　sound file, which has the 韻母 (final) "an".

so, characters share this phonetic component 堇, guess how they pronounce?

難(u+96e3)　naan4　sound file

嘆(u+5606)　taan3　sound file

艱(u+8271)　gaan1　sound file

after thousands of years, the 韻母 (final) of these characters are changed slightly from "an" to "aan", isn't marvellous?

therefore, the simplified script of 难, 叹 & 艰 lose the phonetic component 堇; that no-one in modern time, or generations in the future would associate the correct pronunciation from the component of the simplified character.

c'est patrimoine culturel perdu ☠

lastly, i think that this question is excellent; i worried about the temporary "hold on" status of it. may i ask the rationale of this decision?

水巷孑蠻
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  • Thank you--the rationale for the hold was "too many possible answers". I thought it was an understandable objection, but nevertheless, I was interested in what the answers would be! – Colin Oct 30 '16 at 19:30
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    too many? someone is kidding :) i need to "think" hardly, in order to get a few examples. anyway, do you get what you want in my answer? – 水巷孑蠻 Oct 30 '16 at 19:33
  • Regarding the simplification of to 又, I agree that there is an issue there, especially since 又 is used to simplify a number of other 声旁, so it is too ambiguous. But I don't think it is one of the worst examples, since at least many characters with were uniformly simplified. So we can still use the 又 in 难叹艰 as a reminder these characters have similar pronunciations. – Colin Oct 30 '16 at 19:41
  • Yes, if it were so easy to think of a zillion examples, I wouldn't have had to ask for help! – Colin Oct 30 '16 at 19:42
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    using 又 as reminder? die hard lah :) 歡--> 欢, 觀--> 观; the phonetic component 雚 (final "oon") is also replaced by 又. – 水巷孑蠻 Oct 30 '16 at 20:01
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    Yeah 又 is definitely doing too much work...From @user-487 we also have 鄧 --> 邓 and 雞 --> 鸡 – Colin Oct 30 '16 at 20:13
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    I did vote for this question to be closed and then voted to reopen it after the question was clarified. Simplification damage characters is a fact. Phonetic element removal is one of the ways simplification ruins characters. – Tang Ho Oct 30 '16 at 21:43
  • @ColinZwanziger - A better question would have been something like - 'What are some of the consequences of the simplification process, include some examples?'. I don't see the benefit of just listing characters which were 'damaged' as they can be easily found. Answer above is awesome, list of characters below is not. – going Oct 30 '16 at 22:40
  • Downvoted because losing a bit of phonological is far from causing "severe, unrepairable damages" to a culture. Getting rid of Chinese characters and replacing it with pinyin, as envisioned at that time, would have been. (Also because sentences in English start with an uppercase.) – gb. Oct 31 '16 at 02:52
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The simplification introduced some inconsistency.

The official simplified form of 盧 is 卢, so is easy to reason that 壚瀘櫨轤臚艫鱸鸕顱 should be simplified to 垆泸栌轳胪舻鲈鸬颅 respectively. But at the same time, 蘆廬驢爐 are simplified to 芦庐驴炉 respectively.

Once I wanted to type the word 芦苇(reed). I use wubi input method, which is based on the structure of characters rather than their pronunciation, so I need to break down the charecter I want to input into components. I thought 芦 should be written as enter image description here, so I broke it into 艹、卜、尸. Of course, I didn't get the expected character with these components. I got rather confused. Finally I had to resort to pinyin input method and found that it is 芦 instead of enter image description here.

ltux
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For your information, Chinese glyph has another form, call Cursive. Which become fundamental of so "simplified Chinese".

So the simplification is not born from nowhere (as in Chinese proverb , pop up from the stone), it has it own historical and literature traits.

Most of the old cursive can refer to 《标准草书》

Nevertheless, the cursive glyph are wrote with added creativity, it is not easy even with the simplified word reference book.

Nevertheless , the whole writing things is heavily politicalised. Since pin-ying and handwriting recognition become norm, the original mandarin might re-emerge back to mainland China mainstream usage.

mootmoot
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