Traditional Chinese characters refers to one of two standard sets of printed Chinese characters. The modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han Dynasty, and have been more or less stable since the 5th century during the Southern and Northern Dynasties. The term "traditional" is used to contrast traditional characters with another standardized set — simplified Chinese characters, standardized by the government of the People's Republic of China since the 1950s.

Traditional characters are used officially in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Among overseas Chinese communities (except for Singapore and Malaysia), traditional characters are most commonly used. In contrast, Simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia in official publications. The debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities.

Chinese names

Among Chinese speakers, traditional Chinese characters are referred to by several different names.

The government of the Republic of China (Taiwan) officially calls traditional Chinese characters standard characters or orthodox characters (traditional Chinese: 正體字, ). It should be noted, however, that the same term is used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard, simplified and traditional characters from variant and idiomatic characters (traditional Chinese: 異體字, ).

In contrast, other users of traditional Chinese outside Taiwan, such as those in Hong Kong and Macau, and users of simplified Chinese characters, call them complex characters (traditional Chinese: 繁體字, ). An informal name sometimes used by users of simplified characters is "old characters" ().

Users of traditional characters may also call them "complete-bodied characters" (traditional Chinese: 全體字, ).

Some traditional character users argue that traditional characters are the original form of the Chinese characters and can not be called "complex" as they were never made more complex. The characters were preserved the way they are, and also that simplified characters cannot be "standard" because simplified characters are not used in all Chinese-speaking regions. Conversely, supporters of simplified Chinese characters object to the description of traditional characters as "standard," since they view the new simplified characters as the contemporary standard used by the vast majority of Chinese speakers. They also point out that traditional characters are not truly traditional as Chinese characters have changed significantly over time. Many characters since the Han Dynasty had been made more elaborate than the original standard.

Some older people refer to traditional characters as "proper characters" and simplified characters as "simplified-stroke characters" (Traditional Chinese: 簡筆字, ) or "reduced-stroke characters" (Traditional Chinese: 減筆字,) (simplified- and reduced- are actually homonyms in Mandarin Chinese, both pronounced jiǎn).

Printed text

When printing text, people in mainland China and Singapore mainly use the simplified system, which was developed by the People's Republic of China government in the 1950s. However, the PRC also sometimes prints material intended to be read outside of mainland China using traditional characters (the reverse is also true). In handwritten text, most people use informal, sometimes personal simplifications. In most cases, an alternative character (異體字) would be used in place of one with more strokes, such as 体 for 體. Some simplifications are extremely widespread, such as, notably, the 台 tái in 台灣 Táiwan as opposed to the standard character (臺). Additionally, there were two main usages of alternative characters in the old days. First, alternative characters were used to avoid using the characters of the formal name of an important person in less formal contexts as a way of showing respect to the said person by preserving the characters of the person's name. This act is called "offence-avoidance" (避諱) in Chinese (See naming taboo.). Secondly, alternative characters were used when the same characters were repeated in context to show that the repetition was intentional rather than an editorial mistake (筆誤).

Computer character encoding

In the past, Traditional Chinese was most often rendered using the Big5 character encoding scheme, a character encoding scheme that favors Traditional Chinese. Unicode, however, has become increasingly popular as a way to render Traditional Chinese. Unicode gives equal weight to both simplified and traditional Chinese characters and does not favor either over the other. There are various IMEs (Input Method Editors) available to input Chinese characters. There are still many Unicode characters that cannot be written using most IMEs; one example would be the character used in the Shanghainese dialect instead of 嗎, which is U+20C8E 𠲎 (伐 with a 口 radical).

Web pages

The World Wide Web Consortium recommends the use of the language tag zh-Hant as a language attribute value and Content-Language value to specify web-page content in Traditional Chinese.

Usage in other languages

Traditional Chinese characters are also used in Korean Hanja, and moderately simplified traditional characters are used in modern Japanese Kanji. Japanese Kanji were also simplified. The reform affected a smaller number of Japanese characters, compared the Chinese reform, many simplified Kanji coincide with those simplified in China but a smaller number were simplified differently this creating a third version (e.g. 竜 Japanese, 龙 (Chinese simplified), 龍 (Chinese traditional)).

See also

• Kanji
• Hanja
• Kaishu
• Chinese character
• Simplifications to written Chinese in Hong Kong

References

External links

• Evolution of Chinese Characters
• Chinese Characters and Cultures
• Traditional Chinese Flashcards

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