[Received mod permissions to post]
TLDR: 改革字是介於簡体字和繁体字之間的替代方案 Reformed Chinese is an answer to the seemingly unending Simplified versus Traditional debate. Its purpose is to unify Simplified, Traditional, and potentially Japanese kanji too into one same 漢字 hanzi standard. Reformed combines Traditional’s beauty and Simplified’s legibility, the best of both worlds. I’ve unexhaustively compiled [795 Reforms out of 3700 characters](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lK39EUCqPZukM4NCPzidQg1L0zzKc6zavR6WR9Z6XZQ/) and provided [500 illustrative example sentences](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XGCylNrAD9i-QXMl6PCp8xRJoje6TnahUXfSqUrhDNc/), you are encouraged to ask questions or provide feedback in the Google Sheets, don’t forget you can filter the columns too. You may also request that I convert any Chinese sentences in the comments here into Reformed (to the best of Unicode’s ability).
I spent way, way too much time on this project but am happy with the outcome and am curious what others think 🙏 Photos: #1 Flag, #2-4 Reforms (excerpt), #5 How left-side radical 糸 like in 統、純、練 appears, #6-10 Example Sentences (excerpt)
Quick Links
—
– [什庅是改革字 What is Reformed Chinese?](https://github.com/ReformedChinese/ReformedChineseCharacters) (Full article detailing the process)
– [改革字縂表 Reformed Chinese Characters List](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lK39EUCqPZukM4NCPzidQg1L0zzKc6zavR6WR9Z6XZQ/): 795 Reforms / 3700 漢字 Hanzi
– [改革字例句 500 Example Sentences](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XGCylNrAD9i-QXMl6PCp8xRJoje6TnahUXfSqUrhDNc/) in order of Reformed, Traditional, Simplified
– Also on [GitHub](https://github.com/ReformedChinese/ReformedChineseCharacters), [Instagram](https://instagram.com/reformedchinese), [Medium](https://medium.com/@ReformedChinese/reformed-chinese-characters-4cab6f8ef63), and r/ReformedChinese where I’ll convert Chinese Reddit posts into Reformed
Below are brief excerpts from the full article ([GitHub](https://github.com/ReformedChinese/ReformedChineseCharacters), [Medium](https://medium.com/@ReformedChinese/reformed-chinese-characters-4cab6f8ef63)) which provides much more details about the Reform process. I heavily consulted several sources which I listed in full article, big shout-out to [教育部異體字字典 Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants](https://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/) and Pleco add-on [Outlier Linguistics Dictionary of Chinese Characters](https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/products/outlier-dictionary-of-chinese-characters) (u/OutlierLinguistics)!
Introduction
—
If you’re familiar with written Chinese, you most likely know about the endless, heated [debate between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simplified_Chinese_characters) regarding which is the superior character set, both of which have their own pros and cons. Simplified reduces character strokes often at the cost of beauty while Traditional preserves Chinese culture and aesthetics but may be a hassle to handwrite. In today’s digital age, handwriting is not as much of a high priority versus in the past because most people type and typing Traditional takes the same amount of effort as typing Simplified. For example, pinyin inputting “ma”, just two letters, yields both 馬 and its Simplified form 马 depending on the preferred character set. However when the displayed text size is small, certain complex Traditional characters such as 舊、體、寶 may appear illegible compared to their Simplified counterparts 旧、体、宝. At the same time, Simplified set contains too many visually unpleasing characters e.g. 见、专、风 far off from their historical orthodox forms and it’d be a deep cultural loss to completely discard Traditional for Simplified. Therefore after much meticulous research, I am introducing a new character set, 改革字 **Reformed Chinese**, to capture the best of both worlds: Traditional’s **beauty** *and* Simplified’s **legibility**.
Notable Features
—
– **Overlap** e.g. 会、点、国 in both Simplified and Japanese
– **Resemblance to Traditional** e.g. 變→変、齊→斉
– **Historicity** e.g. 俻 is a variant recorded in Liang dynasty dictionary *Yupian* (玉篇)
– **Consistency** e.g. 儈→侩、澮→浍、檜→桧、etc
– **Logic** e.g. 心 “heart” in 愛 “love”
– **Frequency** e.g. 个、几、从
– **No oddly regularized cursive**, nothing like 东、发、図
– **No cluttering** e.g. 鑿→凿、釁→衅
– **No drastic component omissions**, nothing like 广、产、乡
– Unhooked Chinese Unicode 糸 when left-side radical not 糹, closely similar to what’s found in Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典) and modern Japanese, Korean printing typefaces
Contact
—
Please remember you are encouraged to comment, critique, ask questions about [Reformed Chinese characters list](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lK39EUCqPZukM4NCPzidQg1L0zzKc6zavR6WR9Z6XZQ/) in the Google Sheets itself or here. You may also email me at ReformedChinese@gmail.com. Thank you!
Obligatory XKCD Post
https://xkcd.com/927/
That aside, you’ve certainly put a lot of work into this and I commend you for it
For questions
(1) Your focus seems to be on the “beauty” of Traditional Chinese Characters and the “legibility” of Simplified Chinese Characters
– However, as you aware from the supporting links that you posted, the debate and disagreement is much deeper than this
(2) Who/what is this reform for?
– Your examples seem to imply Standard Chinese and Mandarin Chinese
– You mention Japanese by name
– But there are still many other languages that use Chinese Characters. Creating another standard without including them seems to be pointless
(3) Chinese Characters are Phono-Semantic Logo-Syllabograms, but
– You do not seem to mention “phonetics” anywhere in your description, and from a quick skim some of your examples have actively removed them
– 肰 is the phonetic component of 然, but you replaced 犬 with 大, leaving just 肉 + 大+ 火
– 𡈼 is the phonetic component of 聽, but you have also removed it amongst other things
– Removing phonetic components or aligning them specifically with Mandarin Chinese is a huge criticism of Simplified Chinese Characters over Traditional Chinese Characters
Oh no, not another one. Kudos for effort though.
This proposal: why piss off half (not literally) of Chinese languages users when you can piss all of them off
Did you mean: Japanese? A lot of these are very similar to kanji.
>Reformed Chinese is an answer to the seemingly unending Simplified versus Traditional debate.
I have a feeling this will just lead to a seemingly unending Reformed versus Traditional debate.
I appreciate the effort and don’t want to belittle your work by any means but this seems to me kind of pointless. This really looks like an enlightened centrist take that only end up presenting the worse of both worlds. The only way I could see such a system being used would be if a place that uses traditional *needs* to simplify its script but for some reason don’t want to use simplified, and I’m pretty sure no such place exists. Like for example if Taiwan or Hong Kong wanted to simplify their script, it would make sense for them not wanting to use PRC simplified, but now I really don’t think simplification is even considered an issue in either regions.
Maybe could be useful for among the diaspora that still uses traditional?
Main redeeming quality would be that it is simpler to write while also differentiating characters that are written the same in simplified but are different in traditional, like 面 and 麵.
>I spent way, way too much time on this project but am happy with the outcome and am curious what others think
I agree that you probably spent too much time on it and it has basically zero chance of being adopted widely.
BUT, I agree with you and secretly have thought many times that I wish simplification was a bit more moderate, e.g. it would look nicer if they avoided the “oddly regularized cursive”.
It kind of reminds me of Shinjitai. Can’t imagine how much effort you put into this.
Your proposals mostly overlap with Japanese simplifications, although your simplifications for 麽 and 從 come from the ROC’s simplification proposals of the mid-1930s, I believe.
My opinion is that the Kangxi forms should be the standard CJK forms, since as you pointed out, typing traditional is just as easy as typing simplified. As for the legibility factor, that was indeed an issue in 20th century computing but we’re well beyond that with our high-resolution screens. For the increasingly rare instances of handwriting, I think people ought to be encouraged to use their own preferred simplified forms, whether official or unofficial, as they see fit. They’ll likely be understood anyway.
Oh, you mentioned no “oddly regularised cursive”, yet that’s what 会 is.
I have my doubts that there would be any real unification of Chinese writing: Simplified advocates don’t want to use more complex characters and Traditional advocates don’t want to modify their characters to “appease the LCD”
That said, as a simplification I do think this looks a lot better than anything the current simplification gave us.
I’m big into Conlanging so my first thought is if you were making a language that borrows Chinese characters for its writing this would definitely be nice as that language’s official simplification, a la 新字体
This seems like a lot of effort for solving something that isn’t actually a problem.
A well educated reader of one can generally read the other. So why bother with this?
I actually like this concept. I can’t speak to the actual plausibility of something like this since I’m not of any cultures that use Chinese characters, but it’s a pretty cool idea to me. You obviously put a lot of work into this and it’s a cool thought experiment if nothing else.
Now there are three standards
I think it is really cool when people take the foundations of a language and change it up a bit. It’s similar to making conlangs or romanizations.
In hydraulic fittings there was a British standard, Japanese standard and a European standard. So an American made a standard to unify them all. Now there’s countless standards because everyone comes up with new and better standards all the time and no one enforces any except in certain regions.
This is really interesting
Came here to see what happened to 爱/愛. The simplifiers were heartless bastards! 😀
Totally unnecessary.
I love it, I want to read more traditional characters from manhua and taiwanese media, so this might be a good way to stepping stone path from simplified – reformed – traditional. Maybe they should print some graded readers using reformed
this is beautiful and im amazed by it. i don’t know if it’s fully a thing yet or not but i sure hope it will.
Not meant to offend, but I think the debate between traditional and simplified Chinese are more then just “which is superior”. It has more political issues deep inside. While PRC and ROC both claimed to be REAL China, these characters may represent the legitimacy of one’s regime. Plus, changing whole writing system needs a lot of effort, I don’t think both PRC and ROC government will willing to do this.
I love hanzi and this seems to be an extremely fun (and difficult) project, kudos to you!
Gotta say, I don’t think traditional are beautiful. A ton of the characters are way too busy, certainly disproportionately relative to the simplicity of their meaning. Some simplifications were bad, yes, but a lot are way better. I think there’s some “I am very smart” when people swoon about how much better traditional are. Simplified characters brought increased literacy to millions of people. That’s a beautiful thing.
lol, what a colossal waste of time
多舊🐟
Personally I want to keep simplified but just restore the 言、金 and 門部首 and I’d be happy.
The way no one moved
Gotta be honest, trying to simplify traditional (actual) Chinese characters defeats the whole purpose and is a mistake. Even if it’s something in between simplified and traditional, it just takes away from the fundamental beauty of 漢字.
In your time doing this, may I ask how many characters in the simplified character set are CCP inventions (if you can call it that) that you’ve discovered?
I noticed that there are simplified characters that were adopted by both Japan and China, but they are mostly pre-CCP ones. The rest are just outright bizarre to look at IMO like 广 for 廣, 头 for 頭, or 发 for both 發 and 髮.
It does look much better
Isn’t this mostly just Japanese 新字体
Logging in after years of not touching reddit because I find the whole proposal absurd.
Everyone else has already pointed out things I wanted to say, so I am instead going off of a tangent here, but not before talking about this bit:
> However when the displayed text size is small, certain complex Traditional characters such as 舊、體、寶 may appear illegible compared to their Simplified counterparts 旧、体、宝.
Your supposed “legibility” of traditional script is **not** a problem for most people. In fact, if there are any legibility issues when reading articles or web pages in traditional script, then that is an issue of design *instead of the script itself*, because most people could read them even in small text sizes just fine (see paragraphs in Chinese language newspapers).
You also completely forgot that practically, the vast majority of people are *not* going to care about how a Chinese character looks aesthetically when all they care about is understanding what is being written/printed.
Now, the tangent, it is possible for people to use both simplified and traditional scripts *at the same time*. In fact, there is exactly one place where this is actively practiced by everyone: Malaysia, where the traditional script is used as the headline of major Chinese newspapers, signages etc., while the simplified script is used as the medium in education (currently, not the case historically) and everything else. Not to mention that both the Taiwanese and mainland Chinese mass media and educational materials are actively consumed, so most literate Chinese could very easily read both scripts with no issues.
I think this highlights the failure of Shinjitai and other such *reformed* or *restrained* simplification systems. If the goal is to simplify, then do it. First Round Simplified and Second Round Simplified were, and still are, so radical because they are a holistic approach to truly simplifying Han characters. They make drastic and sweeping changes that apply throughout the entire system to greatly reduce the number of strokes and complexity of characters. They are truly a *simplified* way of going about Han characters.
Shinjitai on the otherhand is a seriously weak system. Not only is it not holistic, it doesn’t do a whole lot in the realm of simplification either. Sure, there are some characters that cut down somewhat heavily on strokes. But, on the whole the system does a poor job at actually simplifying anything. If anything it makes the whole more complex since some components are simplified, whilst others are not.
TLDR; These sorts of schemes are incredibly weak at simplifying anything. If one is to simplify, commit to it. Go full on 2nd round Simplified. If one wants to preserve æsthetics &c., use Kangxi forms. It’s not 1950, simplification for learning, handwriting &c. is senseless.
I’m by no means any expert but why didn’t you simplify radicals?
for example
言 -> 讠
釒-> 钅
it seems to me that this would be the first, simplest, and least controversial thing to do. it helps legibility, decreases clutter which i would argue helps with aesthetics , eases handwriting where that still happens, without sacrificing meaning/logic since there’s only a handful of radicals and everyone knows the derivation/semantic basis
A common argument I see from both traditional and simplified speakers is traditional is too complicated and simplified removes a lot of the meaning behind the word. This just seems like a weird middle ground that doesn’t fix anything
This is a great effort, but in my opinion completely futile. Traditional’s complexity is really just a learner’s scare blown way out of proportion, which is in fact a complete non-issue even in the learning process.
Introducing yet another competing standard only serves to confuse learners and natives alike and there’s no real incentive for it, with contemporary education systems and the consequent improvement in literacy rates.
If there’s really a desire for unification, then use Traditional as a bridge between the standards, not any of the simplification schemes that have come after it, let alone resort to an in-between compromise that satisfies no one.
Public opinion on this subreddit slants heavily towards pro-繁体 so any more conservative system gets more popularity.
The vast majority of the “changes” you’ve made though seem to just be picking shinjitai forms. You’ve also gone with the taiwanese printed forms for several characters which are *not* traditional in any way (e.g. 辶 should have 2 dots if you want “orthodox”, zigzag is not orthodox (written form only), 決 with a 点 last stroke is not orthodox) though I appreciate that may be a font limitation, but then you need to pick a different font.
And frankly I think a lot of the so-called “oddly regularised cursive” is fine, but this fundamentally is a question of personal aesthetics and not any objectively measurable thing.
Not a fan of unsimplified radicals, esp. 言，糸. _>…
说，丝，纵 is my jam.