They want to change them!

http://chinanewswrap.com/2009/08/20/state-officials-claim-amendments-to-44-chinese-characters-will-not-affect-life/

Sure, go ahead, just change the standards as often as you like. I'll just be over here, hunched over my variant tables, banging Unicode code points together, comparing CJK fonts, checking 15 resources on stroke order, parsing pinyin with and without tone marks, and converting full-width punctuation marks back and forth. No, no, it's fine, I'll take care of it.

In fact, I think I've almost got everything worked out now, and that's no fun! Here are some more areas to improve:

* Make some more tone sandhi rules.

* In fact, why not add another tone entirely? Or a set of tones, for more stressed and unstressed flavors!

* Japanese has a good thing going with kanji, katakana, and hiragana -- why don't we switch proper nouns entirely to bopomofo, and revert all loanwords to Gwoyeu Romatzyh, and mix those together with the pinyin?

* Even the characters themselves can benefit from this mixing of styles. Let's face it, 賓 is ugly these days. Wouldn't it be better if we wrote it Oracle Bone or Bronze style, like this?
http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E8%B3%93&submitButton1=Etymology

* There are only a handful of traditional characters that map to more than one simplified, so we just ignore that; makes it too easy, right? Let's add a bunch of really common ones so that I have to deal with it!

* Standard stroke orders really could depend on the preceding and following characters, you know.

* The one-syllable-per-character thing is really unnecessary now, don't you think? 瓩 can be found as "qian1wa3" in some dictionaries. Shame to have only one!

* In fact, let's have some characters be "silent" in certain words--depending on context, of course.

* The character 甭 (beng2) is pretty cool: take 不 and 用 and squash them together when you want to say them fast. Why stop there? Why not allow any arbitrary combination of characters into one character, like combining diacritics but with infinite power! You could put whole sentences into one character, like an enhanced German but for Chinese!

* T恤 (T-xu4, "T-shirt") has a letter in it. Such a nice blend of East and West, don't you think? Let's do more of those. In fact, let's make Chinese character versions of all of the letters, to give them the good old Chinese characteristics.

* Not having person, gender, case, tense, number, comparison, aspect, and all that grammar stuff built into the characters is so... unspecific. China, you can complicate this, I just know it! I wonder, should we keep the pronunciations the same but add all sorts of cute strokes to the characters, or just change the pronunciations opaquely? Let's do some of both!

* Treating regional dialects as separate languages is such a cop-out. Let's make standard Mandarin try to cover some more of them. A few preferred-dialect options here, a few new pinyin-like syllables there, and that should do it, right, y'all?

* Proper pinyin spacing is pretty hard to figure out, but luckily it's not too important. But you could make it important by insisting on spaces and dashes between "words" even when writing in characters. Then it'd be easier to learn, right?

* And really, no excuse for not having a capitalized form of characters that begin proper nouns. if i typed without caps in english, that'd just be lazy--and i know you're not lazy, china.

* Instead of disallowing those super rare characters that people use in names so their kids will have super rare abilities (forget beauty and strength, my kid is going to have the graceful appearance of three running horses fording a stream), let's map them onto existing characters that look similar, sound similar, mean something similar, or are just extremely common and likely to get confused. It's like traditional variants for your traditional variants! Plus, now you can make up whatever character you want and say it's a different form of 李.

* Four is bad luck. Let's randomly delete a character from all four-character idioms. Everyone will just know what you meant, anyway. Why make an complex literary allusion in four characters when you can do it in three? For the next 80 years or so, we'll naturally need to allow people to use in either 3- or 4-character versions and convert between them, but that'll soon pass.

Come on, China. No need to take it easy. Hit me with your best shot! I guarantee it won't be as complicated as English.

wow, that's an amazingly complete list

“Come on, China. No need to take it easy. Hit me with your best shot! I guarantee it won't be as complicated as English.”

So true!

As a German I applaude to the idea of combining characters, and I really enjoy the beauty of 甭.

Come on, haven't you all missed the character for Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftsraddampferkapitänskajütentürsicherheitsschlüsseletui?

Okay, the printer for that needs to have 3000 dpi resolution if you use a common font size...

I'm just wondering if Nick had that prepared beforehand or really just thought up / wrote up that list in the spur of the moment?

henning -- Except that in Germany the words get longer, not shorter. Much, much longer :-)

Trackback...

http://mouseneb.livejournal.com/909.html

Just thought it up; I'm sure there's plenty more where that came from.

I didn't used to be a linguistics geek, honest! It's this blasted startup that got me.

Bring on the linguistic geekiness! Isn't that what we are all here for?

This thread is awesome.

While I am all for progress I don't see the logic behind this change (this could very well be my lack of understanding). Part of me thinks that greater simplification is good (fewer strokes to remember) but part of me thinks that that simplifying the characters makes it harder to remember (as they aren't as unique) - all of me thinks that having some places use traditional and some use simplified is very confusing.