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

Schn'$t$iestschrifr: &says in Homr of John DeFrancis
more than one pronunciation, such as in (4.15) and (4.16).
, but is pronounced
(4.16) UF is pronounced [xia] except in LR 0% where it is
pronounced [he].
G. Many phonetic signs are used for dialectal pronunciations
rather than the Mandarin or Putonghua pronunciations. That is, the
characters represented by the same phonetic sign happen to have the
same pronunciation in some dialect but different pronunciations in
Mandarin or Putonghua. Examples of this nature are given in
(4.17) - (4.20) below.
(4.17) (+[jia] for{$;: \ [jie] for?&
(4.18) [jing] for% : 3% [qiong] for
(4.19) 84 [yin] for&; [yao] for&
(4.20) is pronounced [ju], but is used in $E [gui] for*
H a the complex form,& is represented by two different signs:
,? andp , as in (4.21) and (4.22).
This happens perhaps because the four graphs in (4.21) had already
been used for sometime before 1954. To use the same sign for
those in (4.22) , howeyer, would dre
would represent both P [hu] itself where ;$ would
represent bothfa [hu (which had use for a long .
time as a shor ened name for Shanghai)
5. Conclusion
In this short study, we have shown that a large number (88%)
of the simplified characters in the official list were adopted from
those which had already been in popular use before the
implementation of the simplification movement. It is therefore
inevitable that the language reformers yielded to the pressure of
popular practice more than they adhered to principled means of
simplification. Of the ten patterns (or modes) of simplification
deduced by Wang (1955) , only the adoption of a new phonetic sign
(cf. 1.8) and the replacement by a simpler sign (cf. 1.5) could
potentially add internal consistency to the characters as a system.
We have thus examined cases where these two modes of simplification
are involved. To our disappointment, in no case has the
simplification helped make the characters form a more consistent
system.