Simplified Chinese character

Simplified Chinese characters (Simplified Chinese: 简体字; Traditional Chinese: 簡體字; pinyin: jiǎntǐzì; also called 简化字/簡化字, jiǎnhuàzì) are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese written language. The other set is Traditional Chinese characters. Simplified Chinese characters are the Chinese characters officially simplified by the government of the People's Republic of China in an attempt to promote literacy. This character set is used for most printing in Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore whereas traditional characters are used in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.

Method of simplification

Simplified Chinese characters were developed in one of 5 or so ways, here we list 3:

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• By reducing the number of brush strokes of a character, either by logical revision or by importing ancient, simpler variants or obscure forms. (e.g. 葉 maps to 叶; 萬 maps to 万)¹
• Combining several complicated characters into one, simpler character (a process known as "Character Conflation"). (e.g. 隻, a measure word for certain animals) and 衹 (variant form of "only") conflate to 只, a previously existing character. Note that the traditional character 只 merely replaces these two lesser used characters in Simplified.
• Giving a new meaning to a traditional character with small number of strokes. . This is especially common when the character with fewer strokes is very rare or is no longer used. Note that in the case of the simplification of 餘 into 余, confusion may be raised when classical Chinese texts are printed in simplified characters, as 余 is used as the first-person pronoun in classical Chinese. For example, a phrase like 獨餘余一人(only I am left alone) will become 獨余余一人 when simplified.

¹In rare instances, simplified characters actually became one or two strokes more complex than their traditional counterparts due to logical revision. An example of this is 搾 mapping to the previously existing variant form 榨. Note that the "hand" radical on the left (扌), with three strokes, is replaced with the "tree" radical (木), with four strokes. However, one of the primary goals of the character simplification is to reduce the number of strokes if possible.

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Historically, characters which represented an object often appeared instead as a character for an abstract idea, while the original meaning was re-formed by making the idea even more concrete. An example of this is 然 which originally had the meaning "to burn", but its meaning changed to the prepositional "thus" while "to burn" gained the additional semantic unit of 火?燃.

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