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

Sim-P2arorzic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 1 W 1)
regular ones are listed in (3.1) below:
Among the 24, some are ancient forms, e. g. & and ; some
from popular forms for other characters, e.g.4
Still others seem to be semantically motivated,
and theF Iday or daybreakf in&. lost
e.g. 9~.
,& , 13 , , % , 2 , & ,
etc. But all together, they ony constitute less t an 10% of the
total innovated simplified characters and do not argue against the
overall regularity of the entire class.
Turning to those directly adopted from existing forms, which
are much larger in number, we find it not feasible to do the same
kind of analysis, i.e. by grouping them into modes of
simplification and comparing the number of each mode. But the
overall impression is that many of them are also systematically
simplified since in many cases what is involved in the
simplification are the radicals, such as in (3.2).
(3.2) 4 for s f ?j for$,$for&,s for,& ,% for,%, for
14
~ , ~ I ~ ~
for*
~ B,% Y
for*, etc.
There is, however, a great amount of confusion among many sets
of characters. A well-known example is the overuse of the sign
in more than a half dozen sets of characters, which are not related
in any sense. These sets are given below in (3.3)-(3.9).
A question related to this set is: What would ##'and ?$ be?
(3.7) = g as in &I& (But note that @is not the simplified
f o m of$@. )
\
(3.9) % = 6 as in ,& (Note that)& is simplified to )&. )
I.