1. Explanation
Traditional Chinese characters, a font form of Chinese characters, are called "traditional Chinese characters" in European and American countries. 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.
2. Origin
Traditional Chinese characters, that is, the writing system of Chinese characters produced after the evolution of Xiao Zhuan into official script (followed by regular script, running script, cursive script, etc.). ), which has a history of more than 2000 years, has been a common Chinese writing standard for Chinese people all over the world until the 20th century.
In the history of China, from ancient times to the Western Han Dynasty, there were significant differences between official standard fonts and modern traditional Chinese characters. It was not until the official script prevailing in the Eastern Han Dynasty appeared in the Qin Dynasty that it was closer to the modern traditional Chinese characters.
Compared with all kinds of simplified characters used spontaneously by the people, the standardized Chinese characters promulgated by the court through compiling the "character book" have official authority. However, seal script is still used in the imperial seals and official seals at all levels used in various dynasties after Qin Dynasty.
Official script is the simplification of seal script, cursive script and running script are the simplification of official script, and simplified characters are the simplification of regular script. However, it is not the general trend for Chinese characters to simplify from complexity in the long-term historical development, and seal script is not the simplification of Oracle Bone Inscriptions.
Regular script is not a simplification of official script In order to make the characters record the language more clearly, people share the recording function of the characters with more glyphs, resulting in a large number of differentiated characters.
Simplified characters in regular script appeared in the Southern and Northern Dynasties (4th-6th century), and gradually increased after the Tang and Song Dynasties. Generally speaking, they are commonly used words with more strokes, and most of these words are simplified by cursive and running scripts.
In addition, there is a simplified word, which replaces complex parts with two or three simple symbols. For example, tree, drama, difficulty, joy, opposition, jealousy, Liu, Qi, cleverness, abundance, qu, welcome, prosperity, convergence, interpretation, Luo and Lao (Guan). These are popular folk characters.