Merely rumor: UN to abolish traditional Chinese characters

Everyone,
We need every single person using the Forumosa to sign on this petition. Although Traditional Chinese might be difficult to learn, we cannot just wipe thousand and thousand of years of history just like that. What would be next? Abolish French, German, Spanish and Italian because they are in Europe and let’s only use English?
Use the link
gopetition.com/region/237/8314.html


[Moderator’s note. This story ended up not being true. The United Nations has used only simplified characters since the early 1970s, when the ROC left and the PRC entered. There has been no recent change to this or any U.N. plan to change this in the future.]

Woah there! Hold off the hype and let’s look at the facts.

  1. The UN is not ‘abolishing’ anything. They are discontinuing use of traditional characters in their literature and working processes. It cannot mandate the abolition of anything - the end of traditional characters will come when Taiwan, Hong Kong and the overseas Chinese stop using them.

  2. The UN has six official languages - English, Arabic, Chinese (by default Mandarin), Spanish, French and Russian. These languages have obviously been chosen because they represent both the dominant power blocs and the largest number of speakers in the world. Traditional Chinese has a total number of 40 million users (generous guesstimate) which would place it way down the list in terms of writing systems used in the world. German, Portuguese and Japanese all have more users than traditional Chinese, but their lack of inclusion in the UN’s list has hardly led to their demise or to the disadvantage of native speakers.

  3. Wipe out thousands and thousands of years of history? This isn’t some Stalinist plot to alter the past - all that history is still there. You want to read it in the original? Well, first you have to learn traditional characters. Then, you’ll probably have to learn wenyanwen, which is pretty far removed from modern baihua. The majority of Taiwanese do not read the Chinese classics in the original for the same reason that I don’t read Beowulf in old English - it requires a good deal of special training and it’s bloody hard.

No-one is telling you that you can’t use traditional characters. You can even write in hieroglyphics if it makes you happy and you can find someone else who understands you. Doesn’t mean the UN is obliged to use hieroglyphs, just as it is not obliged to use German or Japanese.

I’m not signing the petition (as you might have guessed by now).

Now, if they had a petition to abolish characters altogether and use pinyin to write vernacular Chinese (i.e. that which is actually spoken) then I’d sign up for that. :smiling_imp:

I agree with Taffy. Personally, I think traditional characters are more beautiful and easier to read than simplified. However, like it or not most Mandarin speakers in the world today use simplified characters. Why should the UN kowtow to the desires of the minority?

When I studied Chinese in university, we were required to learn both systems. If you know one, it’s not that difficult to learn the other. There’s no reason why Taiwanese and Hong Kongers can’t just learn simplified in addition to traditional characters.

[quote=“Erhu”]I agree with Taffy. Personally, I think traditional characters are more beautiful and easier to read than simplified. However, like it or not most Mandarin speakers in the world today use simplified characters. Why should the UN kowtow to the desires of the minority?

When I studied Chinese in university, we were required to learn both systems. If you know one, it’s not that difficult to learn the other. There’s no reason why Taiwanese and Hong Kongers can’t just learn simplified in addition to traditional characters.[/quote]
Especially a minority that isn’t even a UN member? China on the other hand is on the UN security council. Makes sense to me that any Chinese used should be the kind China wants.

Anyway, I thought most people here already know simplified. I don’t see any reason to sign this petition.

Simplified Chinese is like the AIM chatroom version of Chinese; imagine if all we could write is stuff like “LOL U R 5O DUM1111~!”

I forgot. :blush: But I’m trying to re-learn.

Actually, many Taiwanese are absolutely hopeless at simplified other than the simplifications commonly used in hand-writing in Taiwan. For fun ask a Taiwanese what the simplified form of 讓 (让) means.

HG

It is a wonder the UN, beholden as it is to China, still publishes documents in long-form characters. As China does not allow Taiwan represented in the WHO it is suprising that it has allowed the use of traditional characters for this long.

This change is to be regretted, but I can’t see much alternative to the eventual adoption of simplified characters by everywhere except Taiwan. On the other hand, I can’t see it really changing the use of traditional characters in Taiwan. Hong Kong, the other user of long-form, will of course do as it’s told, and I notice many government websites now come in both versions.

I will sign (if the page ever loads). Just because something is a historical fait accompli doesn’t make it right. When traditional characters are no longer written we will have lost something profound. It’s as sickening as the extinction of a species.

Erm… no-one’s suggesting that long form should or will not be written. Only that short form be used at the U.N. for official documents. Big deal. It’s an anachronistic and totally corrupt organization whose days are numbered in any case.
Of course anyone who wants to can and of course will continue to use long form.

I say abolish simplified too. Imagine how easy Chinese would get if it were just pinyin. Then instead spending all their time with bullshit memorization, the Chinese might be able to do useful stuff like invent things instead of copying them. :smiley:

I have no problem with the UN’s decision on this.

So now we can all savor the historical irony of seeing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights printed solely in simplified characters, PRC-style.

unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/chn.htm

I don’t think it’s quite that dramatic. Even Taiwanese frequently use the simplified versions of some characters. For example I always see 什 instead of the traditional 甚. Heck, they even use the simplified version of 台 here.

I think it’s too bad. While I can agree that spending money on translating into a minority language is not in the best interest of all, there are appeals for volunteers to translate certain UN documents into a format that is readable by all. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into Tibetan. Why would it not, then, be proper to translate it into Traditional Chinese, so that it might be read by the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan?

This does not seem to be the spirit of the declaration of simplified Chinese. Part of the discussion is the announcement made by the PRC that only the simplified form of Chinese shall be used in UN documents. The following news article is not freely available on the Internet and so it reproduced here.

[quote=“Shanghai Daily”]UN to use only simplified Chinese after 2008
Zhang Liuhao
2006-03-23
THE United Nations will only use simplified Chinese characters after 2008, the Beijing Morning Post said today, citing linguists.

The UN is currently using both versions of Chinese characters – simplified characters and the original complex form. But the UN has decided to rule out the complex form after 2008, said Chen Zhangtai, chief of the Chinese academy of practical linguistics.

Another noted linguist, 100-year-old Zhou Youguang, also said the UN is preparing to use only simplified characters in all its Chinese files, as it is unnecessary to employ two kinds of characters.

“Meanwhile, the number of people learning Chinese is rising due to China’s increased international influence,” he said. “This will also make simplified characters the unique criterion of Chinese speakers gradually.”

Experts also said simplified characters are also spreading among overseas Chinese people. Although the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government hasn’t issued a special policy, it is popularizing simplified characters. In Taiwan, a number of people are also using simplified characters.

Chinese ranked second in the world’s most widely used languages in 2005, the Post said.
[/quote]

Not only Taiwanese, but also Hong Kongers are protesting this change, and the spirit of the PRC news agency goes: “This will also make simplified characters the unique criterion of Chinese speakers gradually.”

To save money by translating documents into a limited number of languages is understandable, but when those documents outline Human Rights or other important information that should be the right of all humans to receive, it is right to protest the denial of service. First simplified Chinese goes. What is it going to be next: Tibetan? And then what else goes out the door - human rights reports on China?

As regards the article, “In Taiwan, a number of people are also using simplified characters.” Does anyone have info on this?

This is simply another attempt to marginalise Taiwan. That’s all. Simplified characters and the adoption of Soviet vocabulary was a carefully thought out thought-control plan. If you control the language you control the way people think and you control the expression of individuality. The introduction of short-form was a long time ago, but the principle remains the same. Why, you might ask, is it an offence in China to publish in long form or to put up street signs including business names in China to this day? It’s not illegal to put them up in French etc. Why has the Hong Kong government started switching to short form after 150 years of long form? What changed Singapore’s mind? I wonder do Chinese schools in Malaysia still teach long form and bopomofo like they used to?

So now even the language used in Taiwan doesn’t exist. Fine. I would expect nothing less from the PRC, and I would expect the UN secretariat to do what it’s told as well. Of far more importance is Taiwan’s exclusion from the WHO.

The UN is now and always has been irrelevant to the use and future of traditional characters. This storm in a teacup is merely another opportunity for the UN to show how utterly irrelevant it is. If the UN decided to butter its arse and slide down a hill it wouldn’t surprise me. :raspberry:

Classic!!! :notworthy: :laughing: :laughing:

It’s all there in an old thread.

So should we have separate versions translated into British English, or perhaps English English, Scots English, Australian English, Indian English…??? Because that is more or less what’s going on with Traditional and Simplified Chinese. They ARE mutually intelligible, unlike Tibetan and Chinese.

Tibetan and Chinese are vastly different languages, so translation into Tibetan is properly translation for a population who cannot read the first version (in Chinese). People who are native speakers of Chinese and who can recognize traditional characters can fairly easily deduce the meaning of a text in standard written Chinese using simplified characters. There are many tables widely available to help with the characters for which the correspondance is not intuitive.

[quote=“ironlady”]
So should we have separate versions translated into British English, or perhaps English English, Scots English, Australian English, Indian English…??? Because that is more or less what’s going on with Traditional and Simplified Chinese. They ARE mutually intelligible, unlike Tibetan and Chinese.

Tibetan and Chinese are vastly different languages, so translation into Tibetan is properly translation for a population who cannot read the first version (in Chinese). People who are native speakers of Chinese and who can recognize traditional characters can fairly easily deduce the meaning of a text in standard written Chinese using simplified characters. There are many tables widely available to help with the characters for which the correspondance is not intuitive.[/quote]

An American is able to read British English without conversion charts; however, reading Simplified Chinese is a much more complex process for someone who was never taught to read it. Wikipedia does not have separate articles for Simplified and Traditional Chinese. There is a simple computer algorithm that will convert from one graphical representation of Chinese (be it spoken Mandarin or Cantonese) to another, and the few instances where different word collocations are chosen, these are truly minor and can be corrected by readers. Because of the open-source software that is in place, it is easy to read an article written in Simplified Chinese even if you can only read the Traditional characters.

However, important documents such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights assert that the rights of minority language people still exist. But when the UN refuses to allow a simple conversion process to be undertaken for important documents, it is grows more unlikely that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is going to be “disseminated, displayed, read and expounded” at schools in Taiwan teaching Traditional Chinese.

On the surface, Simplified and Traditional Chinese are much different. These differences are quite simply changed by translation software, so it is at the expense of tens of millions of people that prohibitions get placed on minority languages, especially when it is so easy to convert. It doesn’t require a human translator, because a computer can do this conversion. There’s no real reason to do away with the minority written Traditional Chinese language.

[quote=“twocs”]
An American is able to read British English without conversion charts; however, reading Simplified Chinese is a much more complex process for someone who was never taught to read it. [/quote]

i’ve read sandman’s posts for years and i’m not sure that’s true.

i only had a brief introduction to simplified but never had a problem with it. most of the forms are used here in script writing anyway. i wonder how simplified readers feel about reading traditional. i’d bet they usually don’t have huge problems.