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in 1965, but was spread out over a long period of time, and had at least one additional formal stage, in 1977, that was retracted in 1986.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.
Nick Kaldis said,
October 19, 2025 @ 9:40 am
Thank you Phillip Taylor and John S. Rohsenow.
Not having studied this or yet read John's article, it seems from the document that the primary motivation is standardization (even prior to reducing stroke number), so that all localized usage–business, private ("popular"), etc.–employ identical written forms?
Also, how were 10 strokes settled on as a cut off point marking too many?
Nick
Chris Button said,
October 19, 2025 @ 9:48 am
@ JHH
You might want to look into "extended shinjitai" or 拡張新字体.
Philip Taylor said,
October 19, 2025 @ 3:15 pm
No, I'm sorry JMGN — that was the best I could come up with from a very quick search, and I don't have the time at present to conduct a more thorough one.
KIRINPUTRA said,
October 24, 2025 @ 1:45 am
> Formal and informal simplification of sinographs will never stop until they reach the stage of a syllabary or an alphabet.
Stages of this are illustrated in the Hokkien-Taioanese written tradition, in times when the People were left to their own devices, e.g. late Qing — zero public services? But a core of basic graphs seem to float in the alphabet soup, no matter how “advanced” the style — suggesting a role kind of like the Indic numerals in English, but with much more than 10 units.