2015
DOI: 10.1075/lplp.39.1.01pan
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Motives for Chinese script simplification

Abstract: The Chinese script simplification movement originated from the debates about Chinese script (hànzì) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This movement was once the dominant part of language planning and language policy in China. The article describes the three major stages of Chinese script reform in the 20th century briefly, using Cooper’s ‘accounting scheme’ and its eight components as its organizing framework. In the case of Chinese script reform, two of the stages of the script reform movement — the … Show more

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Cited by 9 publications
(2 citation statements)
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“…Scholars often suggest that the transition between seal script and modern characters involved a process of simplification (Schindelin, 2019 ), and our results for handwritten (but not printed) traditional characters support this view. The simplified script was specifically designed to reduce the visual complexity of written Chinese (Pan et al, 2015 ), and as expected our results for both handwritten and printed characters confirm that simplified forms are less complex than traditional forms. Our results therefore provide partial support for the standard view that writing systems are shaped by forces that tend towards simplification, but challenge the idea that these forces have been dominant over the history of the Chinese script.…”
Section: Methods and Resultssupporting
confidence: 85%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…Scholars often suggest that the transition between seal script and modern characters involved a process of simplification (Schindelin, 2019 ), and our results for handwritten (but not printed) traditional characters support this view. The simplified script was specifically designed to reduce the visual complexity of written Chinese (Pan et al, 2015 ), and as expected our results for both handwritten and printed characters confirm that simplified forms are less complex than traditional forms. Our results therefore provide partial support for the standard view that writing systems are shaped by forces that tend towards simplification, but challenge the idea that these forces have been dominant over the history of the Chinese script.…”
Section: Methods and Resultssupporting
confidence: 85%
“…Two nation-wide campaigns, in 1935 and 1977, failed abysmally and even the 1956 reform had its limitations. Despite affecting only about half of the inventory, the over-simplification of certain characters nonetheless introduced unintended reading difficulties (Pan et al, 2015 ) suggesting that the pull towards distinctiveness is formidable even in the face of heavy reform.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%