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

etc.
Sine-Platonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 1 99 1 )
While the aim of Wang's paper is to justify simplification by
historical development through these patterns, the patterns
themselves may also have some synchronic significance, which we
will later discuss,
2. How Many Are Real ~nnovations?
Despite the claim (Wang, 1955: 187) that patterns (1.1) - (1.8)
all involve some kind of 'innovation', there is little evidence
that innovation is the main force in most of the simplified
characters under those categories, unless innovation is taken to
mean deviation from the recorded written form in the history of the
language. In other words, there are relatively few forms that were
completely started by the language reformers responsible for the
movement in order to replace the old complex forms.
To sustain my claim here, it would be desirable, though not
quite feasible as an individual project, to pinpoint which
simplified character was a complete innovation in its strict sense.
It would, however, be relatively easy based on someone's personal
experience to see how many are new in comparison with those which
he had already learned before the official inception of the
simplification movement. The person chosen for this survey must
have had at least a high school education before 1954 when
simplification officially began. He must not have had frequent
contact with the simplified versions since then. The present
author happens to roughly meet the cpalif ications .3 But, of course,
his knowledge of the characters before 1954 is bound to be partial
and thus does not cover all the existing ones prior to that date.
A recognition of this shortcoming, however, will only add strength
to our argument below.
By my judgment, 268 out of a total of 2,239 in the 1964
Official General List of Simplified characters4 are quite
Iunusual1. For lack of a better term, the label gunusual' is here
used to denote four situations:
(2.1) The character would be completely unfamilair to me if it
were not listed,
(2.2) I would not be able to equate the character to a complex
one without an appropriate context,
(2.3) I am likely to give the character a meaning other than
the one for its corresponding complex form, and
(2.4) I am familiar with the character, but do not use it in
my own handwriting.
In our later discussion, the lunusualf characters will be grouped
accordingly. These 268 characters thus seem to be qualified for
the label 'innovation1.
The above figures easily point to another undeniable fact,
i.e. in actuality, at least 88% of the officially approved