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

Sino-Platonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 199 1)
Note again that of these thirty-three simplified characters which are given as variants in this
popular Taiwan dictionary, only nineteen (57%) were correctly identified by more than half of
the thirty-four respondents. Note also that while many of the variant dictionary forms shown in
Table 2 correspond to the popular forms shown in Table 1, not all of those popular forms are
listed as variants in the dictionary (e.g. @), nor are the variant printed forms given in the
dictionary always reproduced in popular usage. (e.g. 4 for chdng, 'long'). It seems then that
educated readers in Taiwan have at least some passive familiarity with such dictionary variants.
even when those forms are not echoed in popular usage, and that this map help to explain their
ability to identify correctly at least half of those Mainland character simplifications which are
based on them. Note also that the correspondence between the dictionary variant and the
Mainland simplified form need not be one hundred percent; for example, while one of the two
Taiwan dictionary variants for the chracter for rie 'iron' is printed as % , with the full standard
'gold' or 'metal' radical on the left hand side, participants in the survey were easily able to
recognize that commonly encountered variant form when printed with the abbreviated 'metal'
radical && now in standard use in the PRC, probably because such abbreviated component
forms in fact approximate what they themselves actually write. This reflects the application of
principles (1) and (2) above in the formation of the standard Mainland simplified forms in the
1950s simplification, with the adoption of many forms which may be termed c-aoshir kailrlra,
'regularized cursive' or 'regularized grass' style forms."
it seems then that simplified characters based upon popular usage which continues to be
practiced in Taiwan (and other Chinese character using communities) is in fact a more accurate
predictor of whether Mainland simplified character forms will be recognized than their
occurance as variants in popular Taiwan dictionaries. Similarly, the principle of merely
preserving the general configuration (likiio) of one of the traditional forms rather than ado ring
the traditional form exactly may be seen in comparing the standard Mainland character &for
yur~ 'salt' with the two variant forms given in the Guoyir Ribao Cidiun ( 5 and .tt ) in which the
Mainland simplified form seems to be a combination of both. Other highly identifiable characters
which preserve the general configuration of the orginal character without using a listed variant
are *$ and $ . We may conclude, then, that the principle of preserving a significantly
recognizable portion of a character as in the characters $p , & , 9 ,
preserving the general configuration of the original characte both seem on t
in Appendix I lo be effective in preserving the recognizability of simplified characters by
Taiwanese, although relatively less so than simply adopting (regularized versions of) existing
popular variant forms. Similarly, redundant parts of a character are identifiable if abbreviated
rather than omitted, as in a& and &#$ , as long as significant portions and the general
configuration of the original are maintained.
The group which is hardest to examine in a survey such as in Part I, in which characters are
given in isolation, is of course hotnophone sirhstitlrtes, where one existing traditional character
was substituted for another more complex form having the same pronunciation. In fact, in the
four cases in Pan 1 where such forms occurred, many of the respondents simply questioned
whether those forms ( ;& , y$ , &. , ) were in fact simplified characters at all, even
when they were not sure of the character's exact meaning. Only in the last case where the
homophonous character $ is often used in Taiwan in place of the far more common but very
complex traditional character && did all but five of the respondents correctly identify its
Mainland usage.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are those characters which none or nearly none of the
thirty-four Taiwan respondents were able to identify correctly. As noted above, eleven of the
thirty-three Mainland simplified forms which also occur in the Glryr, Rihao Cidirrn were
recognized by less than half of the respondents. (See Table 2.) But the majority of Mainland