Traditional Chinese Characters

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Traditional Chinese characters
Chinese characters (traditional Chinese: 正體字/繁體字; simplified Chinese: 正体字/繁体字; Pinyin: Zhèngtǐzì/Fántǐzì) are Chinese characters
Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the standardized character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong and Macau
Macau or in the Kangxi Dictionary. The modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters
Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han Dynasty, and have been more or less stable since the 5th century (during the Southern and Northern Dynasties). The retronym "traditional Chinese" is used to contrast traditional characters with Simplified Chinese characters, a standardized character set introduced by the government of the People's Republic of China
China on Mainland China
Mainland China in the 1950s. Traditional Chinese characters
Chinese characters are currently used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau; as well as in Overseas Chinese
Overseas Chinese communities outside Southeast Asia. In contrast, Simplified Chinese characters
Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia in official publications. However, several countries – such as Australia, the US and Canada – are increasing their number of printed materials in Simplified Chinese,[citation needed] to better accommodate citizens from mainland China. The debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters
Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. Currently, a large number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both character sets.[citation needed]

Contents

1 Modern usage in Chinese-speaking areas

1.1 Mainland China 1.2 Taiwan 1.3 Philippines 1.4 United States

2 Chinese names 3 Printed text 4 Computer encoding 5 Web pages 6 Usage in other languages 7 See also 8 Notes and references

Modern usage in Chinese-speaking areas[edit] Mainland China[edit] Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of China, there is no prohibition against the use of traditional characters. Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China
China primarily in handwriting and also used for inscriptions and religious text.[citation needed] They are often retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear. Nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China
China is dominated by simplified characters. In Hong Kong
Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, simplified Chinese characters
Chinese characters in Hong Kong
Hong Kong and Macau
Macau has appeared to accommodate Mainland Chinese tourists and immigrants.[1] This has led to concerns by many residents to protect their local heritage.[2][3] Taiwan[edit] Taiwan
Taiwan has never adopted simplified characters. The use of simplified characters in official documents is even prohibited by the government of Taiwan. Simplified characters are understood to a certain extent by any educated Taiwanese, and learning to read them takes little effort. Some stroke simplifications that have been incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting.[4][5] For example, while the name of Taiwan
Taiwan is written as 臺灣, the semi-simplified name 台灣 is also acceptable to write in official documents. Philippines[edit]

Job announcement in a Filipino Chinese daily newspaper written in Traditional Chinese characters.

In Southeast Asia, the Chinese Filipino
Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative regarding simplification.[citation needed] While major public universities are teaching simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications like the Chinese Commercial News, World News, and United Daily News still use traditional characters. On the other hand, the Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified. Aside from local newspapers, magazines from Hong Kong, such as the Yazhou Zhoukan, are also found in some bookstores. In case of film or television subtitles on DVD, the Chinese dub that is used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan. This is because the DVDs belongs to DVD Region Code 3. Hence, most of the subtitles are in Traditional Characters.[citation needed] United States[edit] Overseas Chinese
Overseas Chinese in the United States have long used traditional characters. A major influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States occurred during the latter half of the 19th century, before the standardization of simplified characters. Therefore, the majority of Chinese language
Chinese language signage in the United States, including street signs and public notices, is in traditional characters. Chinese names[edit] Traditional Chinese characters
Chinese characters (Standard characters) are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world. The government of Taiwan
Taiwan officially calls traditional Chinese characters standard characters or orthodox characters (traditional Chinese: 正體字; simplified Chinese: 正体字; pinyin: zhèngtǐzì; Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄓㄥˋ ㄊㄧˇ ㄗˋ).[6] However, the same term is used outside Taiwan
Taiwan to distinguish standard, simplified and traditional characters from variant and idiomatic characters.[7] In contrast, users of traditional characters outside Taiwan, such as those in Hong Kong, Macau
Macau and overseas Chinese communities, and also users of simplified Chinese characters, call them complex characters (traditional Chinese: 繁體字; simplified Chinese: 繁体字; pinyin: fántǐzì; Zhuyin
Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄈㄢˊ ㄊㄧˇ ㄗˋ). An informal name sometimes used by users of simplified characters is "old characters" (Chinese: 老字; pinyin: lǎozì; Zhuyin
Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄌㄠˇ ㄗˋ). Users of traditional characters also sometimes refer them as "Full Chinese characters" (traditional Chinese: 全體字; simplified Chinese: 全体字; pinyin: quántǐ zì; Zhuyin
Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄑㄩㄢˊ ㄊㄧˇ ㄗˋ) to distinguish them from simplified Chinese characters. Some traditional character users argue that traditional characters are the original form of the Chinese characters
Chinese characters and cannot be called "complex". Similarly, simplified characters cannot be "standard" because they are not used in all Chinese-speaking regions. Conversely, supporters of simplified Chinese characters
Chinese characters object to the description of traditional characters as "standard," since they view the new simplified characters as the contemporary standard used by the vast majority of Chinese speakers. They also point out that traditional characters are not truly traditional as many Chinese characters
Chinese characters have been made more elaborate over time.[8] Some people refer to traditional characters as simply "proper characters" (Chinese: 正字; pinyin: zhèngzì) and modernized characters as "simplified-stroke characters" (simplified Chinese: 简笔字; traditional Chinese: 簡筆字; pinyin: jiǎnbǐzì) or "reduced-stroke characters" (simplified Chinese: 减笔字; traditional Chinese: 減筆字; pinyin: jiǎnbǐzì) (simplified- and reduced- are actually homophones in Mandarin Chinese, both pronounced jiǎn). The use of such words as "complex", "standard" and "proper" in the context of such a visceral subject as written language arouses strong emotional reactions, especially since there are also political ramifications in this case. Debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters
Chinese characters explores the differences of opinion that exist on this matter within Chinese-speaking regions. Printed text[edit] When printing text, people in China, Malaysia and Singapore mainly use the simplified system, developed by the People's Republic of China government in the 1950s. In writing, most people use informal, sometimes personal simplifications. In most cases, an alternative character (異體字) will be used in place of one with more strokes, such as 体 for 體. In the old days,[when?] there were two main uses of alternative characters. First, alternative characters were used to avoid using the characters of the formal name of an important person in less formal contexts as a way of showing respect to the said person by preserving the characters of the person's name. This act is called "offense-avoidance" (避諱) in Chinese. Secondly, alternative characters were used when the same characters were repeated in context to show that the repetition was intentional rather than an editorial mistake (筆誤). Computer encoding[edit] In the past, Traditional Chinese was most often rendered using the Big5 character encoding scheme, a scheme that favors Traditional Chinese. Unicode, however, has become increasingly popular as a rendering method. Unicode
Unicode gives equal weight to both simplified and traditional Chinese characters. There are various IMEs (Input Method Editors) available to input Chinese characters. There are still many Unicode
Unicode characters that cannot be written using most IMEs; one example would be the character used in the Shanghainese
Shanghainese dialect instead of 嗎, which is U+20C8E 𠲎 (伐 with a 口 radical).[citation needed] Web pages[edit] The World Wide Web Consortium
World Wide Web Consortium recommends the use of the language tag zh-Hant as a language attribute value and Content-Language value to specify web-page content in Traditional Chinese.[9] Usage in other languages[edit] Traditional Chinese characters
Chinese characters are also known as Hanja
Hanja in Korean (almost completely replaced by Hangul
Hangul in the late 20th century, but nonetheless unchanged from Chinese except for some Korean-made Hanja), and many Kanji
Kanji (used in Japanese) are non-simplified, in which these non-simplified characters are called Kyūjitai. Compared to the Chinese reform, many simplified Kanji
Kanji were less affected (such as the character for wide: 広 = Kanji, 广 = simplified Chinese form, 廣 = traditional form). They coincide with those simplified in China
China but some were simplified differently, thus being a different standard (e.g. "dragon" 竜 (current standard Japanese, tatsu/Ryū), 龙 (Chinese simplified), 龍 (Chinese traditional); lóng (pinyin), lung4 (Cantonese), yong (Korean)). See also[edit]

Simplified Chinese characters Chữ Nôm Hanja Kaishu Kanji Kyūjitai
Kyūjitai (旧字体 or 舊字體 - Japanese traditional characters) Multiple association of converting Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese

Notes and references[edit]

^ http://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/trad/hong_kong_review/2016/02/160224_monitoring_simp_trad ^ http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1284691/hong-kong-actors-criticism-simplified-character-use-stirs-passions?page=all ^ http://english.sina.com/china/2016/0229/894388.html ^ Yat-Shing Cheung. "Language variation, culture, and society." In Kingsley Bolton. Sociolinguistics Today: International Perspectives. p. 211 ^ Success with Asian Names: A Practical Guide for Business and Everyday Life ^ "查詢結果 (search result)". Laws and Regulations Database of The Republic of China. Ministry of Justice (Republic of China). 2014-09-26. Retrieved 2014-10-07. ^ Academy of Social Sciences, (1978), Modern Chinese Dictionary, The Commercial Press: Beijing. ^ Norman, Jerry (1988) Chinese, Cambridge University Press, p81. ^ "Internationalization Best Practices: Specifying Language in XHTML & HTML Content". W3.org. Retrieved 2009-05-27.

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