没 vs 沒

[mootpoint]

Hello everyone. I've been learning hanzi (in context) as I joyfully trudge through vocab, grammar, and so on. Generally when I memorize the simplified and traditional versions of a given character, I see the reasoning behind the changes. So what gives with méi? They're so close - why the change? Curious. Thanks for any light that can be shed on this.

[fenlan]

I personally don't know the original reason why the mainland and HK/TW have chosen different styles of writing characters, but I just want to draw your attention to page 33 of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, which gives a whole page of these variations in writing style, many of which actually change the number of strokes in a character. The cao3zi4tou2 is a good example. This is now 3 strokes on the mainland, instead of four etc. In all cases, the mainland characters are easier to write than the older style of writing.

[geraldc]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_chinese

It's a wiki so it might not be totally correct as they can be and often are written by idiots. But the article does give the rationale about how simplifications were decided

[fenlan]

没 vs 沒 has nothing to do with the simplification of characters. This character has not been simplified on the mainland, but the writing pattern, the style of the font, is different.

[zhwj]

This is one of the differences between "new form" and "old form" characters. Sort of like a font standardization.

Like fenlan says, in the front of many Chinese dictionaries, there's a list of all the elements that were changed. This was primarily to make the printed form of characters more closely resemble the handwritten forms. In many cases, this reduced the number of strokes, but not always, and in a few cases the stroke count was actually increased.

Other examples: the 礻 radical had been printed as 示, 糹 formerly was 糸, 青 was 靑, 真 was 眞, and so on. There's a partial image on this page.

[mootpoint]

Thanks all! That answers my question and you spurred me to do a bit of research on the history of character reform. I've been learning from the unicode characters, which I guess are set in stone at this point. I can see how there are several interpretations found in handwriting styles. I think I'm still psychologically differentiating the characters as written language from the characters as a sort of evolving, structured art (maybe?). I will continue to search for the middle ground in my noggin. Exciting stuff! Thanks again everybody.

[Jose]

Mootpoint, this is an interesting topic that has also drawn my attention in the past. I once wrote down a list of characters that are diffferent in a very subtle way in the traditional and simplified standard forms. I posted it here a few months ago. See: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/3468-spot-the-difference .

By the way, the only character I know that consistently seems to be written with more strokes in the simplified standard is 强 / 強 ( 口 v. 厶 in the top right corner, for those whose system / fonts don't show the difference). Does anyone know of any other cases?

[nipponman]

I think it is because they both have different radicals. 殳 is the radical in the simplified version, but in the traditional version, there is supposed to be a whirlpool on to of "right hand" and that was simplified to a knife in the traditional version.

nipponman