Re: The introduction of simplified Chinese characters in mainland

--- Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@...>
wrote:

> Andrew Dunbar wrote:
> > Specifically I have read that China officially
> > introduced the simplified character reform in two
> > phases in 1956 and 1964. However, I have been
> unable
> > to find any more detailed report. [...]
>
> As others told you, the simplification process was
> not carried on in a very
> transparent way, and probably it won't be easy to
> find the original
> documents -- provided they exist.
>
> I read a book whose co-author, Yin Binyong, an aged
> Chinese linguist, acted
> as an advisor in some phases of the Chinese
> simplification process. Although
> the book is not specifically about simplification,
> it gives some insight as
> on how it happened.
>
> BTW, it may be interesting for the computer geeks
> that it also contain
> similar insight about the formation of GB character
> sets, as Yin was also a
> consultant for Chinese standardization bodies that
> designed them.
>
> Yin Binyong, John S. Rosenhow,
> "Modern Chinese Characters",
> Sinolingua, Beijing, 1994,
> ISBN 7-80052-167-2, 0-8351-2474-6
>
> If you can't find it in libraries or bookshop, I can
> see if I can scan the
> relevant pages for you. (But I'll be away for at
> least two weeks now, and
> probably I won't able to do it before January.)

I had a lucky find today in my usual bookshop so let
me
answer my own question.

I believe the relevant documents are:

1956: ºº×Ö¼ò»¯·½°¸ (h×Öº†»¯·½°¸), "Scheme of
Simplified
Chinese Characters": 2 lists which map 544 traditional
characters to 515 simplified characters, A list of 54
simplified basic components.

1964: ¼ò»¯×Ö×ܱí (º†»¯×Ö¿‚±í), jianhuazi zongbiao,
"General List of Simplified Chinese Characters": A
complete list of 2,236 simplified characters from the
3 lists of the 1956 document. This document was
re-published in 1986 with major changes including
reverting a few characters back to the traditional
forms.

I am also very interested in finding more information
about what was changed in the 1986 document, including
a list of reverted characters. Are the reverted
characters included in Chinese character encodings
including Unicode, were they never popular and now
largely forgotten? ¡ª Hippietrail 09:47, 5 Dec 2004
(UTC)

I hope this is of interest to some others since this
information is not easy to find on the Internet and
has not come up before in years of casual surfing and
reading about CJK characters.

Andrew Dunbar.


=====
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