Naturalman
Naturalman

枯葉餘輝

The choice between regular and simplified characters

The official Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau is basically based on the traditional Chinese characters (or traditional Chinese characters). This is the result of the inheritance of Chinese culture and history. In addition to the implementation of simplified characters throughout China, it has also affected countries such as Singapore and Malaysia to follow suit. There are two different ways of writing Chinese in the world, which affects the enthusiasm of ethnic groups in these two fonts to read each other's articles. And label the impression of each other.

Some shops in Hong Kong specializing in business for mainland tourists, in order to cater to mainland customers, often put up advertisements in simplified Chinese characters or some welcome words in the window, and Hong Kong's Meiyang Park and Disney are no exception. In the eyes of businessmen, economic value is greater than everything. , of course they don't care whether their own culture has been invaded and put away simplified characters, but for some Hong Kong people with strong local awareness, the implementation of simplified characters has a sense of cultural aggression, and there is a crisis of changing the normal characters. The sense of loss of sovereignty in a cultural field will inevitably lead to some reactions from ethnic groups to declare sovereignty, so many Hong Kong people are very disgusted when they see simplified characters.

A few years ago, some Taiwanese friends who had little contact with simplified characters told me that it was very tiring to show him an article in simplified characters, because many fonts were not related to the normal characters, although it could be guessed from the context. The writing is careless, but it is unpleasant to read. Maybe Taiwan's cultural foundation is relatively deep and solid, and the threat of cultural invasion is not as strong as that of Hong Kong people. Therefore, if there is no political and ideological intervention, simplified Chinese characters can be regarded as Western languages for Taiwanese. The difference between fried beef with orchid and beef with tongcai is only. People who don’t like to eat broccoli can choose to eat tongcai or other side dishes, but in Hong Kong, people seem to have less and less power to choose!

I have had a lot of exposure to simplified characters since I was a child, so using two fonts is not a problem for me. Text is originally just a carrier for conveying culture, but it would be a pity if a good article cannot attract readers because of the font. Therefore, the cultural difference is not in the traditional or simplified characters themselves, but in the user's attribution to them. People who are used to a certain font will not accept the replacement of the original font by another font. So I will post this article twice in different fonts to see which font gets more readers and compare how they respond differently!

As an author, every time I write an article, I want more people to see it. I use Cangjie to input Faten, and if I don't write in regular characters, my writing speed will be much slower. , so the produced articles are in regular characters, but for those who use simplified characters, they lack a sense of intimacy, and even for those who can’t read regular characters, they simply don’t read my articles, so Every time I publish an article, I ask myself whether this article will be ignored by readers of simplified Chinese characters. For my problem, in fact, the Matters platform can be solved by adding a function that allows users to choose to read in regular or simplified characters at the top of the page!

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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