Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sino-Platnnic Papers, 27 (Aupt 3 1, 199 1)
Each volunteer was interviewed individually and alone by the author, and asked to complete
both parts of the survey. In Pan I each student was asked to write the traditional complex forms
of as many of the one hundred simplified characters given as possible. and was encouraged to
guess if she or he did not know. After completing Part I (no time limit. hut usually within ten to
twenty minutes), the students were then given the four passages for Part 11, told that they were
photo-copied from a Mainland junior high school textbook, and asked to sight-read them aloud
into a tape recorder. Again the interviewees were told to guess at the (pronunication ot)
characters which they did not recognize. All interaction was conducted in Mandarin Chinese.
Immediately after all four passages had been read aloud (usually taking about five minutes). the
Interviewer then went back and asked the reader to clarify orally or in writing which characters
s/he had intended when it was not clear from context. The interviewees usually completed the
entire survey in twenty to thirty minutes.
Part I: Identifying Simplified Characters in Isolation
1. When asked to give the correct traditional forms of the one hundred standard sinlplified
characters given in isolation in Part 1 of the survey (and encouraged to guess when unsure), the
thirty-four respondents were unable to identify correctly an average of 61.53% of the 10U forms,
with individual student's percentages ranging from only 36% missed to 76% missed. Appendix 1
below lists the one hundred simplified character forms given in Part I of the survey, followed by
their traditional standard complex forms as used in Taiwan, plus the number and type of errors
made by the Taiwan respondents. Note that Appendix 3 lists the 1OO characters from Part I in the
order of their increasing relative difficulty, from zero (i.e. recognized by all of the Taiwan
students) to 34 (i.e. rec.ognized by none of the thirty-four students), rather than in the random
order in which they originally appeared in the queslionaire.
2. Analysis of Results of Part 1:
The simplification of Chinese characters carried out in the People's Republic of China in the
1 950s in many cases either eliminated or codified numerous variant character forms or simplified
character forms which bad existed in dictionaries or in popular usage for many years, as well as
extending the various principles upon which characters had already been formed to create new
forms based on analogous principles. Some of the general principles employed in the simpli-
fication process (cf. Montanaro 1985: 4-8: Cl~eng 1975) were:
( 1 ) to adopt as standard some comnionl y used existing simplified forms. or simpler
antiquated or variant forms still in current use;
(2) to adopt commonly used cursive or "grass style1' forms, regularized for printing
purposes;
(3) to delete redundant parts of characters. or to chose one significant portion of a
complex character to stand for the whole;
(4) to employ certain antiquated forms which constitute components of complex
characters to stand for the whole;
(5) to substitute homonophous characters for more complex ones when no semantic
confusion can arise (jir~~ibririn):
(6) to use certain simpler components to substitute for more complex ones within a
complex traditional character:
(7) to extend some of the historical principles of character formation, such as 'picto-
phonetic' (xingshPng) characters, or 'associative compounds' (huiyi).
Although no such codifications or simplifications were carried out in Taiwan, and in fact
were portrayed there as attacks on traditional Chinese culture, nevertheless many of these