After Chinese characters were created by Chinese ancestors thousands of years ago, although the writing style experienced the evolution of seal script, official script, cursive script, running script and regular script, most Chinese characters appeared in the form of "traditional Chinese characters" and remained in use until decades ago.
Traditional Chinese characters are ridiculed as "three more and five more difficulties" among the general public because of their complicated strokes and glyphs. "Three more" means more words, more strokes and more pronunciations. The "five difficulties" are difficulties in recognizing, reading, remembering, writing and using.
In this way, Chinese characters can only be circulated among literati, and ordinary people rarely have the opportunity and conditions to read and write, which is very unfavorable for spreading culture, popularizing knowledge and exchanging ideas.
Since the19th century, countries in the "Chinese cultural circle" have set off a wave of learning western culture and abandoning Chinese characters. Under this influence, many domestic scholars also suggest abandoning Chinese characters and using pinyin characters.
During this period, both inside and outside are not conducive to the development of Chinese characters. Therefore, the reform of Chinese characters is imperative.
At the beginning of 1956, the long-simmering Chinese character simplification scheme was finally announced, and thousands of commonly used Chinese characters were simplified in three ways.
The first method is to delete the strokes of common characters to make writing less complicated.
For example, I close, I close, I live, I am a knight.
The second method is to "save and change" some words according to the writing method of ancient Chinese characters in cursive script and running script, which often appears in the change of radical.
For example, the modified radicals are much simpler than the original ones.
The third method is to use homophones or homophones instead of compound words.
For example, the word "rice" and the word "valley" were originally two unrelated words, but in order to omit strokes, the word "valley" with fewer strokes was used instead.
Nowadays, in the "Chinese cultural circle", Chinese communities in Chinese mainland and Singapore use simplified Chinese characters, while Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea and other overseas Chinese communities still use traditional Chinese characters.
Which is better, simplified or traditional Chinese characters? Up to now, there is still no debate in academic circles.
However, after the popularization of simplified characters, it has played a huge advantage in all walks of life. The most obvious effect is to make it easier for ordinary people to read and write, which has an immediate effect on eliminating illiteracy.
Undoubtedly, the implementation of the simplified Chinese character plan is a very successful cultural project, which is of great significance for China culture to go global.
After 265,438+0 years, that is, 65,438+0,977,65,438+2 months, the second Chinese character simplification scheme comes to the fore. The second simplified Chinese character, commonly known as "two simplified Chinese characters", is a new type of Chinese character font formed by further deleting some strokes and changing the font of some Chinese characters on the basis of simplifying Chinese characters.
From this, it can be seen that "two simplified characters" are simpler and easier to write than "one simplified character", so that1From April to July, 1978, the Ministry of Education issued several notices to encourage people to stop using "two simplified characters" in textbooks, teaching materials, newspapers, magazines, book publishing, blackboard newspapers, slogans, letters and other media for the first time.
In those years, all the Chinese characters that appeared in the print media were "two simplified characters", which looked a little weird.
Why does "Er Jianzi" look strange? Just look at its shape.
There are five main ways to simplify "Er Jian Zi".
First, use homophones with simple strokes instead of words with complex strokes.
For example, wine is abbreviated as Qiang, onion is abbreviated as Yan, and auspicious is abbreviated as Fu.
Second, replace the original word with the characteristic part of the original word.
For example, "two" is abbreviated as "rice" or "two" and "qi" is abbreviated as "qi".
Thirdly, for some complicated Chinese characters, only the outline of the original characters is kept, and some strokes are omitted.
For example, "Tang" is abbreviated as "Yi" and "Stop" is written as "Um".
Fourthly, for some complex parts of the original characters, simple strokes (or single words) are used to replace them to produce characters with similar symbols.
For example, "cut" is abbreviated as "cut".
Fifth, combine a compound word with several commonly used words (or radicals) in the way of recognizing words.
For example, "short" is abbreviated as "short".
In the years from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, "simplified characters" gained popularity and were quickly applied to all aspects of social life. Although the writing is simple, it has hardly played a positive role.
For example, "Deputy Minister" will be written as "Minister Fu", which will easily make the audience mistake it for a minister surnamed Fu. "Egg" will be written as "egg". For those who are used to the former writing, they will be ignorant when they see the latter writing.
The biggest trouble is the change of some surnames.
For example, Xiao is written as Xiao, Lian is written as Lian, Lan is written as Lan, Dai is written as Dai, Yan is written as Yan, Zhan is written as Exhibition, and Yu is written as Yu.
Surnames are passed down from generation to generation by a family, representing a family's consanguinity and clan concept. How can you just change it?
The appearance of "two simplified characters" has brought great trouble to the lives of ordinary people, and its disadvantages far outweigh the benefits, even hindering the forward development of society. Thus, in the early 1980s, a major newspaper published an article on the front page, denouncing "Er Jian", which was evaluated as: the font was weird and confused readers.
1in late June, 986, the "two slips" were abolished. At this point, the nine-year-old "Er Jian" finally withdrew from the historical stage.
The main reason for the failure of "two simplified characters" at that time was that since the promotion of "one simplified character" for more than 20 years, the number of illiterate people in China has been greatly reduced, most people in the country have been able to understand many Chinese characters, and their educational level has been significantly improved. Therefore, there is no need to continue to simplify Chinese characters. Excessive simplification of Chinese characters will be counterproductive, which will not only reduce the cultural connotation of Chinese characters, but also increase the learning cost and bring difficulties to people's communication.