Monday, October 19, 2009

Nerd News: The Battle Over Chinese Scripts -- Simplified Versus Traditional

The battle royale continues. For the record, I think the simplified forms are LAME. They'll create an entire bunch of jumped-up neophyte semiliterates who don't know how to read traditional Chinese, the script of history and culture. If you're going to bother learning Mandarin at all, then you should learn it the real way.

PS: Don't you find it rather thought-provoking that tiny Taiwan is doing a better job of preserving traditional Chinese culture? Writing sytems aside, you can thank your stars that all those treasures of art reside in the National Palace Museum in Taipei; they would surely have been destroyed in the orgy of government-sponsored stupidity known as the Cultural Revolution.

1 comment:

lumpy said...

This sort of thing makes me feel ill. The PRCs are gradually forcing Taiwan out of the public consciousness, one little battle at a time. I'm sure you see what's going on in the larger picture, probably more than I do.

As for the scripts themselves, the traditional is by far the more beautiful, and as you say necessary to read older texts. That may be a feature of the simplified script in PRC minds -- why enable the rabble to read those old bourgeois texts anyway, right?