Traditional Chinese characters, also known as traditional 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 three thousand years. Until 1956, it was a standard Chinese character widely used by Chinese people all over the world.
At present, Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan still use traditional Chinese characters, while overseas Chinese communities such as Singapore and Malaysia mostly use traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters. In Chinese mainland, traditional Chinese characters are preserved or used in the case of cultural relics, surnames, calligraphy seal cutting, handwritten inscriptions and special needs.
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Influence of using traditional Chinese characters:
1945 When the United Nations was founded, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish were the official languages of the United Nations. 1973 Chinese has also been designated as the working language of the United Nations. In the 1970s, after People's Republic of China (PRC) resumed its legal seat in the United Nations, the official Chinese documents of the United Nations were changed from traditional Chinese characters to simplified Chinese characters, and only the original historical documents still kept traditional Chinese characters.
Traditional Chinese characters have a history of thousands of years, so they still have great influence not only in China, but also in neighboring countries of China. Complementarity of simplicity and complexity is the evolution law of Chinese characters. The ancient Chinese character we know today is Oracle Bone Inscriptions, whose strokes are the simplest.
However, in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, many inscriptions on bronze inscriptions were more complicated, and the seal script of Qin Dynasty was more complicated than that of the six countries, while the official script of the later Tang Dynasty tended to be simplified and finally stabilized. Some countries in the world that use Chinese characters have also simplified Chinese characters.
For example, Japan has its own simplified characters (new Japanese fonts) for a long time, which are mainly used in Japanese daily life, but the Japanese government has not announced the abolition of the old fonts, which can still be used in many occasions such as proper nouns.
The Ministry of Education of Singapore issued a simplified Chinese character list on 1969, and began to formally implement simplified Chinese characters. Of course, traditional Chinese characters also have their irreplaceable position, such as in calligraphy. More importantly, traditional Chinese characters are a record of the evolution of Chinese characters. If traditional Chinese characters disappear completely, there will be one less link in the evolutionary chain of Chinese characters.
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