雜項

Another funny anecdote! Here is another sentence that my Taiwanese friend told me about. 「我下麵給你吃」 So this means, “I’m going to cook some noodles for you (to eat).” Nothing wrong with this sentence. 下麵 literally means “down noodles” and refers to the action of putting noodles into a pot to boil them. A synonym could be 煮麵. Now if we look at this same sentence written in simplified characters, it becomes…

I found this post on the blog of a Chinese woman. It is very well written and I think you should all read it. Xiaoning’s Blog Another good site I saw was Chinacopia. Here is what they had to say about the two scripts. Chinacopia I’ll let the two sites speak for themselves.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about this absurd simplification. The word radish in Mandarin is 蘿蔔(luó bo). It is a disyllabic word like “butterfly” 蝴蝶 or “camel” 駱駝. Just like any of these words, its characters contain a semantic component, which gives us a hint as to its meaning, and a phonetic component. In this case we have 羅(luó) and 匐(fú). The pronunciation of 蔔 has changed over time and is no longer very phonetic with regards to its phonetic component.

7. 詹 Obviously the Chinese government did not have a problem with this component. There are enough characters to prove it. If they had changed all of the phonetic components 詹 to 旦 then I would have no problem, but no, they could not. You cannot change 儋 to 但 because it already exists. A traditional learn can go from from 擔 to 担 much more easily than a simplified learner can go from 担 to 擔.

6. 瞿 Everything looks fine here, no problems that I can see. But wait…there is one simplification… Why change a phonetic component that is already phonetic when all of the other characters that use it have not been changed?

5. 韱 It takes a few seconds to write, but I find 韱 very beautiful as a character. Apparently the Chinese government didn’t have a problem with it either. Or…did they? Ack! They did it again!! Why?!? Now we have 佥 in the first character used to replace 韱, but 佥 is the simplification of 僉. How did this happen? There are two characters in the traditional script, 簽 and 籤, that were both simplified to 签.

4. 襄 襄 itself is pronounced xiāng. When used as a phonetic component characters are usually pronounced rang, xiang, niang, nang(in descending order of frequency).“Rang” is the most common pronunciation, usually in the 3rd or 2nd tone. The first pair of characters, 孃 and 娘, are actually variants of each other. We will not count them, I have only added them because in simplified characters they are both 娘.

3. 韋 Here we have 韋 and 衛 in 4 characters that have not been simplified. Here is where things become uneven. The normal simplification for 韋 is 韦. I would have no problem with that…if it were consistent. So most characters containing 韋 have had it simplified to 韦, makes sense. However, look at 衛. A new generic character has been created. 卫 is nothing more than a symbol.

This is part 2 of my “More inconsistencies in simplification” post. Again, I did not show all characters that have been affected. 2. 蜀/屬 Here, all of the characters are identical except for the final two, whose radicals have been simplified. I have included a few characters with 屬 since the pronunciation of both components is the same. 屬 is actually made up of 尾 and 蜀. Let’s move onto the next image.

So I enjoyed doing the post on 巤 so much that I’m going to do another one with more examples. Seeing as this post turned out to be rather long, I am going to be breaking it up into seven parts. Each post will contain one of the seven phonetic components that I will be going over; they are 言蜀韋襄韱瞿詹. I will be showing two sets of characters for each component.