Hot answers tagged traditional-chinese
4
To answer your question, we need to clearly understand how Traditional Chinese characters got simplified, which I bet 99.999999% of the whole Chinese population don't even know about.
This is a very big topic that I am not able to discuss about it in detail. So I will give a much simplified explanation.
Consider these 2 sets: Traditional Characters vs ...
3
Most characters are composed of a phonetic and a semantic component.
The phonetic component is a character with a similar pronunciation (...or at least the pronunciation was similar at the time the character was created). The semantic component (or signific) indicates the meaning, although usually very vaguely (again, meanings--like pronunciations--change ...
2
I can think of the following reasons why you might encounter them (in order of appropriateness):
Proper names, especially family names whose bearers want to maintain a tradition
Linguistic text about the other kind of character
Simplified handwriting in Taiwanese or Japanese
Careless copy-and-pasting from 2 sources
Do you have any specific case they ...
2
Consider traditional and simplified characters as two sets with a mapping between them. I'll refer to to simplified as S and traditional as T. Let's call the mapping M, and we'll say (s,t) ∈ M if there's a mapping from s ∈ S to t ∈ T. So, for example, we have
为 ∈ S
為 ∈ T
(为,為) ∈ M
One obvious question: Are S and T disjoint? No, they are not. For example, ...
1
Two quick points:
These characters have differing ages. Some of them have etymology tracing back to the oracle bone script, others are newer.
船 doesn't mean a 'large boat', just a 'boat'.
I'm not really interested in going through full analysis on all of these, but suffice it to say that this article lacks correctness on both age and meaning claims.
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