The Chinese Language in Modern China

I've posted previously about the Chinese language. Here is another you might find interesting. Below is an excerpt from an article about the evolution of the Chinese language in modern China. It's a very interesting read. If you click here, you can read the whole article.

The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving

By The Editors

(Credit: Princeton University Art Museum) Detail of a Ming Dynasty scroll by Zhu Yunming in the cursive script.

The Times recently published an article about China’s effort to manage the vast number of characters in the Chinese language. A government computer database, designed to recognize people’s names on identity cards, is programmed to read about 32,000 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, cutting out the more “obscure” characters.

This is not the first attempt to modernize a sprawling and ancient language. The most ambitious effort was the introduction of a simplified system of writing in the 1950s. As part of the Communist Party’s campaign to reduce illiteracy, simplified characters were promoted as the common written language, replacing many traditional characters.

More than five decades later, simplified characters remain the standard writing system of China, while Chinese elsewhere — especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong — continue to use traditional characters.

We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.

• Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, professor of Chinese literary studies
• Eugene Wang, professor of Asian art
• Hsuan Meng, writer, World Journal Weekly
• Norman Matloff, computer scientist