Hong Kong and Macao have less than 30 years left each as seperate jurisdictions at this point, and Traditional Chinese is losing ground rapidly now abroad, both in Southeast Asia and in North America - not only in Overseas Chinese communities, but also among foreign learners of Chinese who understandably perhaps see the ability to communicate with the written word with over one billion people as outweighing aesthetic and cultural considerations.
As far as Taiwan is concerned, even the most optimistic of us can’t at this point completely ignore the writing on the wall - and as far as I can tell, that writing is most certainly in Simplified Chinese.
That assumes that people in the PROC do not learn traditional characters. The assumption is wrong. Many university graduates have to study traditional characters since some of the texts they have to study are written with traditional characters. Cantonese uses traditional characters while mandarin in Hong Kong doesn’t. The issue is much more complex than what you have stated.
While it is the case that a minority of the mainland Chinese population - mostly university students and graduates who have focused on language or history - have a good knowledge of Traditional Chinese, I highly doubt that the average mainland Chinese can read the average novel printed in Traditional Chinese without stumbling. From my personal experience, many (perhaps most) mainlanders can recognise the most common characters like 門,國,還,etc., especially when the simplified form is not terribly different, but that is all.
It is true that Chinese in Hong Kong and Macao write with traditional Chinese, but I think this is very likely to change after 2047/2049. I suppose we can’t yet know with absolute certainty what will happen, but barring some apocalyptic event capable of changing the future status of Hong Kong and Macao, I think the trend is clear enough. Once the borders between the two cities and the rest of China are dismantled and mainlanders are allowed to settle there freely, and once Beijing feels at liberty to unilaterally make whatever changes it likes to the status of the two SARs’ official languages (currently “Chinese” defacto Cantonese in both with Traditional Mandarin as the written form), I think they will very quickly be brought in line with the rest of China - with the result that Cantonese in the two SARs will go into terminal decline, along with Traditional Chinese.
The average native speaker can not read Dickens. That says nothing about the language or them. It is just a fact. The average Mainlander can not read the original Confucius, and it again says nothing about them or the language. It is just a fact. The similarity of these facts should be an indication of another trend.
Cantonese will continue to be written in traditional characters for centuries to come. Mandarin may not but it doesn’t mean that traditional characters will disappear.
I just don’t think it is even worth debating. Do we still speak like Shakespeare? Obviously not and the language has changed but I think “decline” is a strong word.
The average native speaker can read Dickens, and your analogy is flawed (the analects of Confucius are written in Classical Chinese, not only in Traditional Chinese charaters, whereas Dickens wrote in what is now a very slightly dated - but perfectly comprehensible - form of Modern English).
Cantonese is rarely written in either Traditional or Simplified characters. Hong Kong and Macao people - regardless of what their spoken dialect is - write in Traditional Chinese characters, either Standard Written Mandarin or Classical Chinese.
Cantonese speakers on the mainland generally write in Simplified Chinese characters, much as their monolingual Mandarin-speaking compatriots.
“Do we still speak like Shakespeare? Obviously not and the language has changed but I think “decline” is a strong word.”
No we don’t speak like Shakespeare, and it is safe to say that Early Modern English is not spoken any more. Besides, Written Mandarin in Traditional Chinese is not broadly accepted - certainly not by most Taiwanese - as being somehow an archaic form of written Chinese that has been superceded. Either simplified or traditional characters can be used to write modern or old Mandarin, Classical Chinese or any number of Chinese dialects.
With respect, your analogy is once again flawed.
As for Cantonese, I was told before I went to Guangxi Province that it was a stronghold of the language - only to find when I arrived that it was clearly spoken by less than half of the population. Even in Canton itself, it is apparently on the decline - and in Shenzhen it has nearly been wiped out at this point.
The average native English speaker would find Dickens tedious and difficult to read. They would probably encounter a fair amount of words they might not know and would probably never use.
The argument could now be made that people in Bermuda and South Africa and India should not be considered native speakers etc etc and then this whole discussion will spiral into a sleepy tale.
I wasn’t trying to make an analogies. The issue of traditional versus (not meaning with) simplified characters is a lot more involved than what we have in this thread.
I beg to disagree; English as written and spoken in the 19th and 20th centuries differs only slightly from that spoken today, and as written, Dickens’ works are perfectly easy to read today.
Take “A Christmas Carol”, for instance. There are some words used in the text which have become slightly archaic due to changes in society since the book was written, such as “ironmongery” or “workhouses”, but these few words no not make the work hard to read.
Either way, I’m not sure exactly what your point is. English is a vernacular language and always has been written more or less as spoken. Any older form of the English language is not analogous with Classical Chinese, which has been solely a written language for thousands of years. They are not analogous with Traditional Chinese either, since either Traditional or Simplified Chinese characters can be used to write vernacular or Classical, old and new forms of the Chinese langauge.
“The argument could now be made that people in Bermuda and South Africa and India should not be considered native speakers”
That would depend on whether or not English was their native language, naturally.
I don’t disagree with anything you are saying. My point, albeit it poorly communicated, was that we expect the majority of native speakers to be fairly well educated, but in reality they aren’t. The British scored less than 7 on IELTS academic reading in a relatively recent study. The Dutch outscored them. What we believe and what is actually the truth do not always match up. Now granted, Dickens might not have been the best example.
Let me have another attempt.
Very few people read the economist. It doesn’t mean that they have to write it for the average person. Simplified Mandarin exists to make a language that is notoriously difficult to read, available to less educated native speakers. It does not mean and I do not think they aim was ever to replace traditional characters. They have and will always have their place in the world.
My opinion and how well I communicate it clearly do no match up here so you can go ahead and take this apart a well. I did not spend mre than 2 minutes thinking about it and it shows
That’s just wishful thinking by people like Ma Ying-jeou.
Unless China takes over and imposes simplified characters (which I think is unlikely even if China does take over), Taiwan is not going to adopt simplified characters. As a result, foreigners who want to be literate in Taiwan will have to learn traditional characters.
I wonder if the language will at some point become more similar than now, especially for e.g. foreign names or technical or scientific vocubulary. English has the same scientific vocabulary in UK or USA, but Taiwan and China are really different.
I don’t see any problem with characters, though. But I wonder if Taiwanese will just buy simplified books in the future, the same as they buy traditional ones today, just because there are so many simplified books available. If they do it like that, maybe some Taiwanese publishers may think twice about creating an own Taiwanese book, if most people will just buy the simplified version.
The other way round, if these two book markets may become closer to each other, Chinese publishers will also by default create an traditional version of the book, for selling it in HK or Taiwan.
I think the market will decide what is eventually used in Taiwan, not politics.
LOL.
I can imagine that conversation.
Do we print this illegal copy of the book in traditional or simplified Chinese. Both La. Taiwanese people read more and they can’t read simplified…???
Smartest thing said on this thread…“the market will decide”
As more books move to electronic forms, though, it will be easier and easier to bring out dual-character-type versions of books, since if you do the book in Traditional first, it’s a simple conversion. (Starting in Simplified and moving to Traditional can cause problems as it is no longer a one-to-one relationship for the conversion.)
Likewise, as OCR technology gets better, it will be easier for pirated mainland books to be offered in Traditional characters (if anyone cared to do it) since it would be fairly easy to get an electronic version to convert.
I perceive Taiwan as being a more generally literate and reader society than the Mainland person for person. I wonder what the relative numbers of frequent readers are in both places? I’m sure there are still more in China just due to population imbalance between the two, but the ratio probably wouldn’t be as high as just looking at population and no other factors.
You mean the same way the market caused all versions of English to merge into the single version that is currently in use world-wide?
And then there is Japan: Taiwanese and Japanese kanji (hanzi) are to a large extent the same or differ only in minute detail, and in those cases where there are more significant differences, the characters are still mutually intelligible, however. The contemporary Chinese kanji on the other hand, are by far not as accessible to Japanese speakers (i don’t know but can imagine how inaccessible Japanese kanji are to the average Chinese student).