Re: Simplified or traditional for each Chinese macrolanguage

On Wed, Jul 27, 2016, at 02:12 AM, John Cowan wrote:
> > The only thing we currently have no idea is Literary Chinese (Classical
> > Chinese, or kanbun in Japanese). In mainland China, Simplified Chinese
> > characters are  used for Literary Chinese, 
> 
> My understanding is that this is not entirely true: that works written
> in wenyan are usually written using traditional Chinese, at least if
> they are older than 1919 (the May Fourth Movement), even in the PRC.

Textbooks use simplified Chinese for Wenyan in mainland China.

As an example, Loushi Ming is a poem written in Tang Dynasty. It can be
seen in Chinese class of middle school in mainland China. This is the
version used in mainland China [1], and this is the version used in Hong
Kong [2] and Taiwan [3].

(Another evidence: since Chinese classes generally require writing some
of this kind of poems from memory, if I learned that in traditional
Chinese, I should have been able to write traditional Chinese
characters... But actually I can't. I learned traditional Chinese from
various reading materials, but I've never written it by hand.)

[1] http://so.gushiwen.org/view_71138.aspx
[2] http://www.rthk.org.hk/chiculture/chilit/dy04_0401.htm
[3] http://art.pch.scu.edu.tw/sing/lou_shi_ming.htm

- Xidorn

Received on Wednesday, 27 July 2016 01:40:40 UTC