traditional Chinese characters
Traditional Chinese characters, a font form of Chinese characters, are called "traditional Chinese characters" in Europe and America. Generally speaking, it refers to the Chinese characters replaced by simplified characters in the Chinese character simplification movement, and sometimes it refers to the whole Chinese character regular script and official script writing system before the Chinese character simplification movement. Traditional Chinese has a history of more than two thousand years. Until 1956, it was the standard Chinese character used by Chinese people all over the world.
Traditional Chinese characters are still used in Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and most overseas Chinese communities such as Singapore and Malaysia are traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters. In Chinese mainland, in the case of cultural relics, variant surnames, calligraphy seal cutting, handwritten inscriptions and special needs, traditional Chinese characters are retained or used.
Knowledge expansion:
The word "traditional Chinese characters" is only used when a word has simplified Chinese characters. If a Chinese character has no corresponding simplified character, it belongs to the category of inherited characters. But in some cases, the fonts popular in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan are generally called "traditional Chinese characters" or "traditional Chinese characters", and some strokes are more than the former, such as "Qiang".
Influenced by writing habits, some Chinese characters in Taiwan Province Province have been merged, but the replaced characters can still be used as variant characters, only a certain term of the word has been replaced.
Oracle Bone Inscriptions is the oldest mature script in China. From Oracle Bone Inscriptions, inscriptions on bronze, big seal script to small seal script, the font gradually became mainly line symbols, and the font gradually became fixed. Since the Northern and Southern Dynasties, there have been vulgar characters with fewer strokes. For example, the popular word "Liu" has already appeared in the existing Yuan Dynasty engraving "Water Margin".
The principles of simplifying traditional Chinese characters into simplified Chinese characters are "saying without doing" and "progressing steadily by convention", that is, using simplified Chinese characters popular among the people for a long time as far as possible, only making necessary changes, and simplifying them according to the principle of "progressing steadily by convention".
Chinese characters are also aesthetic objects. In the development of thousands of years, Oracle Bone Inscriptions, bronze inscriptions, seal script, official script, regular script, cursive script, running script and other fonts have been produced one after another, and the art of calligraphy, seal cutting and word interpretation has been developed, which has promoted the development of Chinese painting art and made people enjoy great aesthetic and spiritual enjoyment, thus leaving an aesthetic image in people's hearts.