才 or 纔?

[davoosh]

When I first began learning Chinese (I began with Cantonese), I was taught by older teachers (60+ I'd say) from Hong Kong. I remember them using forms such as 纔 (for 才) and 衹 (for 只) however I have never, or almost never, seen these forms used sine then. Have they completely fallen out of disuse in favour of the easier-to-write forms? Would those who use traditional characters find the use of 纔 and 衹 funny?

[gaogaozhan]

Good question. I remember China once promised HK 50年不变。

A couple of years ago, they were trying to introduce simplified Chinese to HK.

 

才 is rather Mainland China.

先 is a more natural way.

[davoosh]

@Gaogaozhan,  I realise in spoken Cantonese 先 is used more than 才, however I am specifically asking about the use of the more complex character 纔 for 才. The questions applied to all traditional-character users.

[stapler]

I have yet to see 纔 instead of 才. Neither have I ever seen 衹. So I guess it might be something more particular to hong kong.

 

The variants I do see often are 甚/什, 爲/為, 牀/床, 藉/借, 台/臺, um, and some others I can't remember off the top of my head.

[OneEye]

I generally only see 纔 and 衹 in HK and Mainland-published academic books in traditional characters. They're not really used in Taiwan AFAIK.

[Auberon]

I asked this very question (seperately) to two youngish (mid-20s) people from Taiwan with whom I was practising some while ago, as I'd seen it in the dictionaries and wondered why no-one seemed to use this form (on a computer, 'easier-to-write' is moot). Both were not even familiar with 纔, and one mistook it for 饞. But both assured me that 'no-one' (at least, in their circles) uses it, and they literally hadn't seen it before.

Not sure about 衹 as I've never used it instead of 只. I have certainly used 甚/什, 爲/為, 牀/床, 台/臺 with Taiwanese and they all seem to have been perfectly understood; however the natives I've chatted with always use the latter version of these characters.

 

Of course, this is merely my own experience; if you exchange messages with professors of literature, then perhaps they will look askance at you for using 才 instead of 纔. I'm curious of the etymology of the two; is 才 merely a phonetic replacement in the sense of 'just now'?

[Takeshi]

I am aware of 纔, but I have never actually seen it used.

 

衹 however, is common in HK signage, it is definitely not strange in formal writing, but in casual writing most people would use 只。

[skylee]

I know very little about such things.

But I need to deal with a lot of signage, forms etc at work. There are various types of writing styles and fonts in a fairly laissez-faire style in the materials that I come across. I thought I needed a standard but there was none. So I asked my colleagues to look for/at two government documents that deal with variants called 異形字對照表 and 異形詞對照表 (they were hard to find but we managed to find them). And since then things have become better. In these documents commonly seen variants are grouped and listed in two columns called “主流” and “其他”. And in quite an HK style, there is a remark saying that the documents are not 規範標準.

I recall replacing a 祇 (one dot) with a 只 recently and I did not need to explain it. 纔 is not even on these documents.

Just a thought.