Hi Yeleixingfeng,
Haha! You go much further than me, wanting a standardized 字根表, whereas I only wanted a standardized set of
names for the already standardized list of 214 Kangxi radicals.
[At this spot I would normally have written a diatribe against the simplification committee for not producing a standardized list of simplified radicals, but I've stopped feeling that in the past few months. Ah-bin explained - right here in this topic - that at the time of the reform, the intention was to ultimately get rid of the characters, so nobody thought that it was important to produce such a standardized list. Ever since having received this insight, I still find it regrettable that such a list doesn't exist, but I do understand the historical reasons for this. And hence no diatribe: "Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent" ("To know all is to forgive all").]
Yes, I too would love to have a standardized 字根表.
In fact, why should the idea 部首 exist? [...] why do we even need to categorize characters into 部首s? To facilitate dictionary-consulting? Don't get me wrong, I warm-heartedly welcome Chinese enthusiasts. Nonetheless, should a language be modeled to appeal the needs of new learners or its indigenous users?
Well, even native-born Chinese (including great and learned scholars) need to look up obscure characters once in a while. And that is specifically the situation where one doesn't know the pronunciation, so a non-sound-based method needs to be used. The 部首 happens to be one of them, has existed (in its 214 radical form) for 200-300 years, so I'm all for it (or for a modern, rationalized, standardized replacement for it).
Your 尙-example is indeed a very good one, illustrating where the simplifiers destroyed a previously very nice unity. I do regret this too. But - as you may know - I'm still a supporter of the simplification. To compensate for this, there are also some instances - but only of specific characters, I admit - where the phonetic was vastly improved. I can't think of a single example at the moment, but perhaps I should memorize 3-4 of them, for use in discussions with opponents of the simplification
.
Simplified C is plain blind and arbitrary.
This is a point often raised by opponents of simplification. My only reply to this is: yes that's true - or at least, it
appears to be true. From the point of view of a standardized set of traditional characters, the simplified set looks completely chaotic and arbitrary. [I mean here the "one-off" changes, not the "characters simplified by analogy" (类推简化字), which I will mention later. These latter are
not chaotic and arbitrary.] So, I can't dispute that the "one-off" changes appear chaotic and arbitrary.
BUT (and this is for me a very important but), I would ask the opponents of simplification to look more deeply into the detailed history of Chinese characters and the simplification. Opponents of simplification often portray the simplification process as: "Oh, we had this beautiful, regular, standardized system 'traditional characters', and then those stupid reformers (the phrase "CCP stooges" comes to mind
) came along and wrecked it. It's something I believed for years too.
But the reality was quite different.
As far as I understand it now, up to the mid-19th century, there was a proliferation of forms. Not only was there variation between handwritten characters and printed characters, but even printed characters appeared in a large number of variants. And a native-speaker living in China in 1900 would have been familiar with many of the variants, and just coped with them as best they could. So, even before the simplification, there were already movements to try and get this sorted out. All that the simplification did was to pick a particular subset of this huge variation as the proclaimed standard.
Now, there's no denying that a lot of the choices they made were in opposition to the then commonly used printed forms. For example, they explicitly chose for the "calligraphic" versions 讠, 钅, 饣, 马, etc (because of the fewer number of strokes, obviously), and these were - prior to the simplification - not at all acceptable in printed usage. But they would have been familiar to everyone at the time (and to us now, even if we're only starting to learn Chinese, as these are regular correspondences: all 馬 were standardized to 马 , and all 訁 *when written on the left* were standardized to 讠, etc, etc - the "characters simplified by analogy" (类推简化字) mentioned above).
As for the "one-off" changes, as I said above, these were also (often) already known variants used in handwriting (or even print). I mention in another reply elsewhere on this Forum that the process of selection of the variant was quite a long, consultative process, and factors like 'is this variant known at a wider level than 1-2 regions?' (e.g. provinces), 'is this variant not restricted to just a particular class or profession in society', etc. Such factors were taken into account before proposing a simplified character as the new standard. And then, after the proposal had been made, there was consultation as to the acceptability of the proposed character. As I did the last time, I would recommend the book "Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics" by Ping Chen, which gave me my best insights into the historical process of simplification. It was this book which finally made me stop disliking the simplified characters, and started me accepting that it was part of a natural (and good) process.
I can try and find two other good references to more in-depth material to illustrate my point, but that will have to be later, as I have run out of time to post now.
I'm curious where U get your faith. I heard that the PRC is rolling out an ambitious program to rid Kwongtung / Kúiⁿtang of both Cantonese broadcasts and pre-PRC kanji at one fell swoop!
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