Unofficial simplified characters
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It has often been mentioned on Language Log that the simplification of Chinese characters by the PRC government did not come at one fell swoop in 1965, but was spread out over a long period of time, and had at least one additional formal stage, in 1977, that was retracted in 1986.
This has resulted in uneven acquisition of separate sets of simplified characters by students who went through primary and secondary education at different times.
From Yizhi Geng:
I am writing to share an observation about Chinese characters that I find interesting. Are you aware of a term called Second Simplified Chinese Characters? It was published by the Chinese government in 1977 but was soon abandoned in 1986. I have observed that in my family, my grandmother (born in 1940) still uses these characters, while my grandfather (born in 1935) even uses traditional Chinese! My grandfather was born into a landlord family in Anhui Province and studied traditional Chinese characters as well as English at a private school run by his father. My grandmother came from a worker’s family in Changchun City without any primary educational background and learned all the characters during her work. I found that many of my family members, including my parents’ younger sisters (born in 1967 and 1975), and I (born in 1998), are not able to read Second Simplified Characters. Even many of my friends born between the 1980s and 2000s have never heard of them. However, my grandparents can communicate using Second Simplified Characters and Traditional Characters without any difficulty! They write notes on the door, refrigerator, and shoe cabinet like this:
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The note from Yizhi pictured above does not have the instance of the doubly simplified word for "shoebox" that he is talking about here:
“鞋盒 written as “X合” (shoe box).
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Formal and informal simplification of sinographs will never stop until they reach the stage of a syllabary or an alphabet. This is the natural development of all living, functional logographic / morphosyllabographic scripts (e.g., nǚshū 女書 ["women's script"], kana, hangul, chữ Nôm, etc.). Mixed scripts like Chinese and Japanese, which include both phonetic and morphosyllabic / logographic components do exist, but even they are witnessing the encroachment of phoneticization.
Selected readings
- "Grids galore" (11/19/23)
- "The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase" (8/8/24)
- Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
- "Aborted character simplification in the mid-1930s" (10/5/24)
- "Simplified vs. Complex / Traditional" (4/23/09)
- "Simplified Bomb" (6/9/09)
- "The complexification of the Sinoglyphic writing system continues apace" (12/16/22)
- "Writing: from complex symbols to abstract squiggles" (6/11/19)
- "Love those letters" (11/3/18)
- "Pinyin in practice" (10/13/11)
- "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
Nick Kaldis said,
October 18, 2025 @ 8:47 am
Is there a title and publication information for the dictionary mentioned: "'Second Simplified Chinese Characters' published by the Chinese government in 1977"
I'd be interested in looking through it.
Nick
jhh said,
October 18, 2025 @ 9:33 am
I'd be interested in seeing something about simplified *Japanese* characters– things not taught in school, but frequently encountered.
Philip Taylor said,
October 18, 2025 @ 10:15 am
Could this perhaps be what you are seeking, Nick ?
JMGN said,
October 18, 2025 @ 11:08 am
@Taylor
Could you provide a copy with a higher resolution? Or even a true pdf?
Victor Mair said,
October 18, 2025 @ 11:09 am
Thank you very much, Philip.
See if you can find the characters for writing "shoe" and "gas" here.
You can see where they (the reformers) were headed and why the hanziphiles freaked out.
wgj said,
October 18, 2025 @ 11:34 am
This second/third batch (second under PRC, third if one counts the initial one under ROC) has a "past is future" quality that is not uniquely, but quite typically Chinese, because in oracle and pre-Qin bronze scripts, there were few radicles, and homophones routinely shared characters. Later, the same basic character would gets different radicles attached to it to form – or branch out into – different modern characters. One of the main ideas of the third batch is to go back to that concept and let homophones share the same character (again). By doing so, the phonetic aspect of characters would be strengthened and the semantic aspect weakened, and this shift to more phonetization would also pave the way for the writing to be completely alphabetized one day – at least in the hopes of some of the language reformers involved.
wgj said,
October 18, 2025 @ 11:52 am
I think "discontinued characters" is a better description rather than "unofficial".
John S. Rohsenow said,
October 18, 2025 @ 12:42 pm
Nick Kaldis and others may wish to read my article “The Second Chinese Character Simplification Scheme,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, vol. 59 (May 1986), pp. 73-85, and possibly also "“Can Taiwanese Recognize Simplified Characters?” in Victor's Sino-Plantonic Papers 27 (August, 1991), pp. 183-197.
Victor Mair said,
October 18, 2025 @ 2:56 pm
John Rohsenow is the go-to man for the Second Chinese Character Simplification Scheme, also for the ZT experiment — both very important developments in the history of the Chinese writing system during the 20th century.
Michael Watts said,
October 18, 2025 @ 11:12 pm
They might be impossible to read in isolation, but a sentence seems near certain to fix that.
For example, I was not able to read 𭳿, but I could understand the sentence without difficulty, and I was able to identify the character that was supposed to be weird since it was the only one I couldn't read. The effect is to see something like "when you leave, turn off the water, electricity, and ?? gas", which is not a challenging instruction despite the lacuna. You'd need to have two separate gas utilities before there'd be any room for confusion. (I did speculate that the unfamiliar character represented 燃, which was wrong. If I knew the language better (or the person writing the note), I presumably would have gotten that right too.)
合 for 盒 isn't capable of confusing anyone, because 合 already exists and it is pronounced identically to 盒. I assume this substitution sees use as a typo right now.
Well, sort of. I can certainly see why hanziphiles freaked out. There might be a suggestion of heading toward a syllabic script, but I don't really see this list as having a single unified strategy. Some characters are replaced by homophones. Others are replaced by components that the more traditional form includes.
Sometimes the simplification fits neither of those descriptions. The one that leapt off the page to me was simplifying 潦 to 了 (!), where I can't quite read the attached footnote ["uses of this character that are correctly read lao4 should be respelled with [another character]"?], but the pronunciations I find for that character, even excluding lao4, aren't a good match for 了 and I'm uninclined to look for even more overloading for 了 anyway.
There's also a simplification of 停 ting2 to 仃 ding1, with the footnote saying "in 伶仃, the 仃 should still be read ding1". By implication, the pronunciation of 停 isn't going to change, just the spelling. That one might be defensible on the theory that we're taking the 丁 in the bottom right of 停 to stand for the whole 亭, but it's still a graphical strategy rather than a phonetic strategy.
I can't think of a theory to explain why 演 is simplified to ⿰氵㝉.
Michael Watts said,
October 18, 2025 @ 11:21 pm
Some more looking over the list:
I'm also surprised by the proposed simplification of 道 to replace 首 with 刀. That's easy to explain on phonetic grounds… but it means changing 道!
The change of 磊 to ⿱石双 seems difficult to justify by any measure. It cuts the character from 15 strokes to 9, but this isn't a common character so there's little benefit in practice, and there's a noticeable loss of symbolism and a loss in ease of memorizing the character.