The UN is planning to abolish Traditional Chinese. Being a Hongkie and having been brought up in a family where learning traditional Chinese is the 'proper' Chinese, it truly saddened me when i read this.... Please sign the petition to stop the abolishment of traditional Chinese! http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/say-no-to-united-nations-abolishment-of-traditional-chinese-in-2008.html
Why are they abolishing it? I haven't been following the news lately so I don't know what is going on at the moment.
that's ridiculous; just my two cents. i think of it in this way: we have slang and formal language right? traditional chinese is like the "formal" and by banning that, you're cutting corners. ahh! what is the world coming to? i really don't want to look back on this 10 years from now and have traditional chinese seen as an "ancient art". :( and uhh.. this poll dates back to last year March. so wouldn't this entire thing be over by now?
I didn't knew there was such thing as abolishing the use of Traditional Chinese by the UN. I thought they allready abolished -LOL ... Its not true that simplefied characters are less 'traditional' - Some Simplefied charaters are even older than their Traditional Counterparts.... pros:I think simplefied chinese is much easier to learn (for starters and foreigners) BUT Traditional Chinese carries subtile meanings with it(apart from its clearer meanings), its part of chinese heritage....I learned it and It looks much prettier...compared with some simplefied things... SO : I really support this petition!!! btw...it isn't al hoax guys??
In fact, like Cantonese, traditional Chinese holds more resemblance to the older form of Chinese. The simplified Chinese was not introduced until the 1950's, how old can it be? And I hate the fact that simplified Chinese clump together a few traditional Chinese characters and replace them with one single simplified Chinese character... One of these days we'll need some experts to interpret what a sentence means due to all the possibilities and contexts @_@b
lol wtf.. the UN shouldnt have any right to abolish a language... that should be something handled by Chinese internal government. this doesn't make sense to be.
Well, the UN didn't abolish the traditional Chinese, just that they no longer print their official material in said script... Even the Chinese government doesn't quite have the right to abolish traditional Chinese, seeing their official language is Mandarin and simplified Chinese...
Hi Hiake, im not talking about the entire Simplefied chinese language...but about special characters in this written system... take as example the chinese name of HSBC 匯豐 (moste of us know these characters?) 'woei fung' or something TC version:匯豐 SC version: 汇丰 the nowadays called simplefied version: '' is actually older than the complicated '豐' version. They found the 丰 in earlier chinese writing while the 豐was introduced much later... (I like the complicated version more) and 張三豐(I think u know who this man is?) wrote his name actually in this form: 張三丰 and there are more of this kinds of 'simplifications' ... i haven't got any disagreements with these replacements... But i really dislike the way they simplified the radicals of charactes :S ...realy can't write them... and: yes, my teacher for classical chinese already told me that cantonese (and other chinese 'dialects') have more resemblances with older form of spoken chinese(than modern mandarin chinese)...so rithm in poets are better 'visable' if u speak canto....but there are way more manda speakers than canto speakers...the importance of canto is really declining :(
Well, the thing about it is that I don't think Hong Kong (or anywhere else for that matter) will bother going through all the simplified characters and see if its origin is older than the traditional character and decide, base on the character's age, whether it should be restored as the PROPER word... While I understand there are simplified characters which holds more resemblance to the older form, there are traditional characters which do (resemble the older form than the simplified counterpart) also.
U seem quite a chinese language expert ! am i right? actually...there is a commission in china which does...(some vage language commmision) which discusses the use of simplified characters and so on. I saw this HK docu in a Cathay flight about the language 'problem', very interesting... I don't think there is any need to check the age of characters,...its just all about knowledge of the origin of our own language and proper use of chinese characters.. isn't '復古' the word for restorating the past language practices? I don't think its neccesary to revive the use of older characters....its ok the way it is now..... and u are right, most of traditional characters resemble the proper form instead of their simplified counterpart....i just tried to point out some examples which are the other way round.... I prefer natural evolution of the language(ofcours in line common practices), without too much inteference from government regulations... so we don't really differ from opinon?? but i support this petition!!
i have seen so many ppl in hong kong msiread simplified and why the hell do the chinese want to stop being traditional ....
LOL, I guess not then -sweat But then I didn't really quite see the point of this petition seeing that the UN ALREADY removed traditional Chinese format as one of their official languages... -mellow
UN? abolishment of a language? i seriously doubt thats true.. UN doesnt meddle with the affairs concerning the evolution of a country.. well... it shouldnt lol
ya the UN is just rubbish...i rather learn traditional than simplified cuz it easy to learn simplified.....i dont know what they are thinking.....i mean they should be worrying about the decline of oil than our greatest language
Well, the UN simply stop treating the traditional Chinese as an official language, no more UN docs will be printed in traditional Chinese etc...
