One Simplified Part, a Thousand Simplified Characters — Epoche B1
Simplified characters were not invented one by one, and John DeFrancis's The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984) is a good place to see why. The reforms of the 1950s and 1960s worked on shared components, so a single change travelled through hundreds of characters at once. The General List of Simplified Characters, published in 1964, is arranged in three tables. The first holds characters simplified on their own. The second holds components — the repeated parts from which characters are built. The third holds everything that follows automatically once those components change: more than a thousand characters, simplified without anyone ruling on them individually. Compare two columns: Traditional Simplified What was merged 發 / 髮 发 to send out; hair 後 / 后 后 after; queen The comparison shows both sides. Writing became faster and easier to learn, and the saving was systematic rather than random. But where two characters were given one form, a distinction disappeared. 发 now carries what were once two separate words, and the reader recovers the difference from context. In a newspaper that is easy. In a name, a poem or a classical line it is not. DeFrancis is careful here: he treats the reform as engineering with known costs, not as decline. Confucius warned that "if names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things" — and the reformers answered that a language nobody can write is also not in accordance with anything. The book is forty years old and still among the clearest accounts in English of what was traded. Read it, then read a page of each script. The simplified page is quicker. The traditional page tells you where the words came from. Neither fact cancels the other, which is exactly DeFrancis's point. References DeFrancis, J. (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. University of Hawaii Press. State Council of the People's Republic of China (1964). Jianhuazi zongbiao [General List of Simplified Characters]. Beijing. Confucius. The Analects, Book XIII, trans. J. Legge (1861). Trübner & Co.