Making it simplified
A while back I posted about the use of simplified characters in the word Taiwan. It is also interesting to note that quite a few simplifed characters can be seen around Taiwan. It is not surprising given that many of the simplified characters are based on cursive or shorthand forms of the traditional characters. Many Taiwanese will use simplified characters when writing, but would just consider them an easier way to write rather than simplified characters. Below are a few pictures with examples of the simplifed characters seen on signs around Taipei.
Taiwan Beer (台灣啤酒)
Beer drinkers obviously like to keep things simple. As noted before the simplified form of the wān (湾 vs 灣) in Taiwan is used here.
Organic vegetables (有機葉菜)
This sign for organic vegetables uses the simplified character for jī (机 vs 機). The simplified form is much easier to write.
Electric light bulb (電燈泡)
This sign for electric light bulbs uses the simplifed character for dēng (灯 vs 燈). I think this would have been chosen because fitting the traditional character in the sign would have made it very difficult to read. For characters with many strokes writing them in a fixed square often means the strokes have to be very close together and they are often difficult to read at small font sizes or, in the case of the sign, where wide strokes are used.
As an aside 電燈泡 (diàndēngpào), which means electric light bulb, is also an idiom. It can be used to refer to a third person joining a couple on a date.
Fried noodles (鐵板麵)
This sign uses a semi-simplified form of the character tiĕ (铁 vs 鐵). The right part of the character uses the simplified form, but the gold radical (金) on the left retains the traditional form. The character for noodles, miàn, used here conforms to neither the simplified or traditional form (面 and 麵). I think they just ran out of space while writing the sign.
None of this compares to the simplified simplified Chinese I once saw in China (sorry no photo). Chicken egg, which would normally be written as 鸡蛋 (jīdàn) in simplified Chinese, was written as 几旦, substituting a homophone for both characters.
Simplified characters in Taiwan
Taiwan gets a Chinese test
Book review: ABC Chinese-English Dictionary
The bomb and the big mistake
Book review: Far East Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary
Posted: August 22nd, 2006 under Chinese characters, Languages in Taiwan.
Comments
Comment from Charlie
Time 22 August 2006 at 9:19 am
whops, sorry for some english mistakes in the first reply and I also forgot one more character: 麪 (mian4) or 麫 (mian4)
Both of theses characters are considered as simplified forms of 麵 (mian4) , but PRC uses a phonetic simplification or 面 (mian4)
Comment from David
Time 22 August 2006 at 9:53 am
鉄 — where did you find this character? Is it Kanji (japanese)?
麪 and 麫 are also interesting. Perhaps what was written on the sign wasn’t so irregular after all.
I must add that without unicode, posting both traditional and simplified characters on the same page would be very difficult.
Comment from Chris
Time 22 August 2006 at 11:47 am
The beer has the simplified character for Tai (platform) and train tickets use the traditional character.
Comment from Bryan
Time 22 August 2006 at 1:19 pm
David,
Yes, 鉄 (tetsu) is Japanese and it is used in Japanese words like 鉄道.
Thank you for the really interesting post. It never ceases to amaze me the subtle difference in the form of chinese characters used in Taiwan, Japan and China. I too have wondered why Taiwan is written using simplified characters quite often.
Comment from David
Time 22 August 2006 at 1:45 pm
chris,
I discussed the various ways of writing in Taiwan in the article linked to at the beginning of the post.
bryan,
Nice to have someone from Japan visiting my blog. Another one I want to write about is why the word for geisha is written differently in Chinese (藝妓) and Japanese (芸者). It relates a lot to people’s different ideas and understanding about what geisha do.
Pinyin News has already discussed the use of the word in Chinese.
Comment from Charlie
Time 22 August 2006 at 9:49 pm
Using Microsoft New Bopomofo (Xinxhuyin) you can use it to type this character, I used bopomofo: ㄊㄧㄝˇ
You can use the following link t check some characters and their Chinese/Japanese/Korean pronunciation:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihansearch.html
See Ya
Comment from David
Time 23 August 2006 at 7:39 am
It works on my computer too!!!
I can type all three forms of tiĕ
鉄 铁 鐵
Comment from Mark
Time 24 August 2006 at 1:03 am
I guess it’s kind of like how we see the simplification of “analogue” -> “analog” as perfectly fine in a formal situation, “night” -> “nite” as questionable, and “through” -> “thru” as more questionable, and “You’re” -> “ur” as completely unacceptable.
Comment from Charlie
Time 22 August 2006 at 9:06 am
鐵 vrs 鉄 and 铁
臺 vrs 台
聽 vrs 耵 and 听
發 vrs 発 and 发
The first characters are the traditional complex forms of these characters, while the second ones are simplified but accepted as traditional ones, the most representative one is 台 (Tai2) used even on goverment buidings; 鉄 (Tie3) and 発 (Fa, Fa4) are often seen in Japanese and used on informal contex in Taiwan.
While 铁 (Tie3), 听 (Ting) and 发 (Fa, fa3) are considered strange simplifications of these characters (from PRC), many Taiwanese people doesn’t know these as simplified ones and would use the ones mentioned above instead