A tablet displaying traditional Chinese characters.

By Liu Chang

Chinese characters have evolved through time. Over thousands of years, the once curvy pictographs on bones and turtle shells have straightened their legs and arms to become vertical and horizontal strokes and dashes. The various characters symbolizing animals, landscapes and activities have matured to take on uniformed shapes.

"If you look at the history of Chinese characters as a whole, you will find that simplification is the general trend," explained Professor Su Peicheng, an expert in Chinese character studies at Peking University.

Simplification developed sequentially. First, the Chinese character fonts changed then the characters' structure changed. Font-wise, modern Chinese characters have fewer curves and more vertical and horizontal strokes and dashes compared with their ancestors. Structure-wise, they have fewer strokes and dashes, appearing more abstract than their traditional versions.

For example, the character for horse is written as 马 in traditional Chinese. In its ancient form, the three horizontal strokes on the top half of the character were curvy, symbolizing a horse's flying mane. The four dots below looked like a horse's four legs. The character was clearly inspired by the image of a galloping horse. However, in simplified Chinese today, there is no mane in the character and the four legs have been reduced to one horizontal stroke.

Calligraphy experts and linguists did not create the simplified form of the characters. They evolved as a communicative tool in ordinary people's daily lives. As far back as the fourth century, there were already simplified Chinese characters. In the Sui and Tang dynasties (581-907) simplified characters were extensively used. These were called "folk characters." About 80 percent of simplified characters in use nowadays date back to before the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The promotion of simplified Chinese characters in modern times began with the New Cultural Movement in early 20th century. The movement called for the creation of a new Chinese culture reflecting Western concepts of politics and science.

The simplification of Chinese characters was promoted together with the use of plain, colloquial expressions in writing and standard Mandarin, or putonghua in the spoken language.

Although simplified characters seem much more abstract without the picture-like shapes, over the years various regional governments and movements have tried to promote their own versions. Those efforts were largely unsuccessful or partially abandoned due to the threats of war or unstable social environments.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the survival of the fittest, seemed to apply to the life of a character and simplified characters serve the communicative function of written characters better than traditional characters do.

"They are simpler to write and remember, thus more efficient for recording and easier for people learning to read," Su said.

"Governments want to eliminate illiteracy and promote work efficiency, so they are willing to promote simplified characters. Less time will be spent writing and reading the characters and more people will be able to master the characters," he explained.

When New China was founded in 1949, the government was faced with a large illiterate population. As a result, promoting simplified Chinese characters was a priority.

However, there were thousands of characters in both traditional and simplified forms. A single traditional Chinese character can take on different simplified forms and they often vary from one region to another and in different dialects. Therefore a national standard had to be set.

"The general principle was to promote the most commonly used simplifications of the most frequently used characters," Su said. "Also, the government wanted to promote simplification slowly and gradually, in a way that would not make people confused or jeopardize the stability of the Chinese character system."

In 1956, the State Council issued its Simplification Plan for Chinese Characters. In the plan, a total of 515 simplified Chinese characters and 54 radicals, or Chinese character components, were highlighted by the government, making more than 2,000 simplified Chinese characters official. Previously, "folk characters" were used only on handwritten billboards and personal notes. Now they were deemed by the government as official.

Simplified Chinese characters not only made it easier for illiterate people to learn to read and write, they also helped foreign Chinese language learners understand written texts.

"The biggest difficulty for foreign learners is to learn the characters. This often scares away Western learners who are used to writing in Latin letters," Su added. "Simplified characters help make it easier."

Steven Halim, an Indonesian who once took Chinese writing lessons in Singapore echoed Su's opinion. "I am glad that we were taught simplified Chinese characters. A horizontal stroke makes the number one and two horizontal strokes mean two. It if they were in the traditional forms, it would have taken me a week instead of a day to remember how to write the numbers."

While simplified characters have their advantages there is also a downside. Some components have been so oversimplified that they have lost their roots. Take the character 驴 meaning donkey and 炉 meaning stove. They both have 卢 meaning shed as their right radical; but when simplified, 卢 became 户 meaning family for the character for donkey and 卢 became shed for the character of stove. This mutation in simplification has made it difficult to restore simplified Chinese characters to their traditional form simply by substituting the simplified radicals with their traditional counterparts.

"There are more pros than cons for simplified Chinese characters," Su explained. "Every coin has a head and a tail. The language is constantly changing through everyday use. It is a natural development trend for the characters to continue simplifying. By looking back at history and looking into the future, we will find that Chinese characters are becoming more regulated, easier to learn and easier to use."

To contact the author, email: liuchang@globaltimes.com.cn or chg.liu@gmail.com