United Nations to Abolish Traditional Chinese in 2008

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Okay just dropping in to the BoM to see if people might be interested in signing the petition to say NO against abolishing traditional chinese (sorry if this isn't in the right section, brain is still in information overloaD from study so I might not be thinking straight =/ )

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/say-no-to-united-nations-abolishment-of-traditional-chinese-in-2008.html

 

Languages evolve and change, simplified chinese seems to be the direction so I see little point in this petition. UN has in the end very little influence in the matter, it will be the chinese speaking countries that affect it and the biggest and most significant of them seems to have made up its mind so it pretty much seems that resistance is futile.

[ June 13, 2007, 14:09: Message edited by: Morgoroth ]

 

China is more than a little able to decide what to do with its language - or what happens at the UN. Which, by and large, seems more predisposed to preserve old languages (look at the UNESCO program) than to ban them Quite frankly, if such a measure passes it will be because Beijing is behind it and wants to give it some "international gloss."

It may sound strange, but the only reason the UN would have anything to do with it is if China thinks that abolishing the traditional alphabet on its own would lead to counteractions, especially by Taiwan. AFAIK in Beijing they are always thinking of keeping Taiwan close - and eventually getting it back.

Still, I'll give it a look, just in case.

Edit: okay, so this is against using traditional Chinese in UN documents. Hmm, except that the UN will cut down the number of translators, how exactly would this impact the fate of traditional Chinese?

[ June 14, 2007, 08:57: Message edited by: The Shaman ]

 

i understand evolution, i study biology after all, but simplified chinese is not a result of evolution. It is people actively changing the language of chinese, i.e. it is not natural.

The chinese characters we are using now comes from, around, 221 bc. Over the course of this 3000 years a lot of characters changed due to the natural result of evolution, some characters no longer useful, some characters no longer have current meaning, some characters are created because new stuff are created. Simplified characters comes around in 1956; The simplification covers replacing a few different characters with same pronunciation with a single character, replacing a more complicated character with just a part of that character, etc. Therefore simplified characters cannot justified stuff written before 1956.

A lot of chinese are afraid of simplified characters replace traditional characters. Like i said, traditional characters comes around in 221 BC, when the first emperor of china unified the whole country. Before him, there were a least 6 states in china and each using their own "chinese characters". Then the cruel first emperor came, force everyone to use the same characters, killing those opposed and burning books along the way. A large of chinese heritage were lost at that time. Simplified chinese are just repeating history itself. Even earlier than that, when archaeologists dug out artifacts from ~1700 BC, they found that chinese characters were lesser, using a characters to express different meanings. Chinese characters became as time goes on. Comparing trad. chinese with 1700 BC chinese, one can see how a character representing different meanings evolve into different characters.

Any person who learn chinese can easily identify sim. and trad. chinese characters. So there is no need to have different persons doing the same job. Financial consideration, or even convenience, is not even a problem here.

UN is suppose to represent the whole world. Using only sim. characters effectively silence some parts of the world, this isn't very healthy.

[ June 14, 2007, 12:16: Message edited by: teekc ]

 

So apparently Beijing has a better lobby at the UN than Taipei does. Interesting, but hardly surprising - at least unless Taiwan really cries wolf and starts pulling strings with Japan and the US.