Structure of Chinese Characters: Simplified vs Traditional

Abbreviations: M. = Mandarin reading, C. = Cantonese Reading, J. = Sino-Japanese reading

This post will not try to determine which system is better, Traditional or Simplified, and will not discuss some of the obvious differences perceived as strengths and weakness of each (stroke count, aesthetics, etc.). Instead what I hope to discuss here is how the simplification of characters altered the structure of these characters (for better or worse or neither). My focus will be on phonosemantic characters (characters that are made up of a meaning component and sound component) as they make up the bulk of Chinese characters.

Phonetic component replaced with a different, simpler phonetic

	Character	Semantic	Phonetic
Traditional	遠 (M. yuǎn, C. jyun⁵) “far”	⻌ (辵) “walk”	袁 (M. yuán, C. jyun⁴)
Simplified	远 (M. yuǎn, C. jyun⁵) “far”	⻌ (辵) “walk”	元 (M. yuán, C. jyun⁴)

	Character	Semantic	Phonetic
Traditional	竅 (M. qiào, C. hiu³/kiu³) “aperture”	穴 “hole”	敫 (M. jiǎo, C. giu³)
Simplified	窍 (M. qiào, C. hiu³/kiu³) “aperture”	穴 “hole”	巧 (M. qiǎo, C. haau²/kiu²)

Phonosemantic character replaced by completely new phonosemantic character (both semantic and phonetic component replaced)

	Character	Semantic	Phonetic
Traditional	驚 (M. jīng, C. ging¹) “startled”	馬 “horse”	敬 (M. jìng, C. ging³)
Simplified	惊 (M. jīng, C. ging¹) “startled”	忄(心) “heart”	京 (M. jīng, C. ging¹)

Arbitrary component of a phonosemantic character replaced to create a new phonosemantic character

	Character	Semantic	Phonetic
Traditional	竊 (M. qiè, C. sit³) “steal”	穴 “hole”, 釆 “distinguish”	禼 (M. xiè, C. sit³)
Simplified	窃 (M. qiè, C. sit³) “steal”	穴 “hole”	切 (M. qiè, C. cit³)

	Character	Semantic	Phonetic
Traditional	歷 (M. lì, C. lik⁶) “history”	止 “stop”	厤 (M. lì, C. lik⁶)
	曆 (M. lì, C. lik⁶) “calendar”	日 “sun”	厤 (M. lì, C. lik⁶)
Simplified	历 (M. lì, C. lik⁶) “history, calendar”	厂 “cliff”	力 (M. lì, C. lik⁶)

Phonetic component replaced with simpler semantic component (phonosemantic character simplified into a semantic compound character)

	Character	Semantic	Phonetic
Traditional	淚 (M. lèi, C. leoi⁶) “tear”	氵(水) “water”	戾 (M. lì, C. leoi⁶)
Simplified	泪 (M. lèi, C. leoi⁶) “tear”	氵(水) “water”, 目 “eye”	— — — — —

	Character	Semantic	Phonetic
Traditional	陰 (M. yīn, C. jam¹) “yin”	⻖(阜) “mound”	侌 (M. yīn, C. jam¹)
Simplified	阴 (M. yīn, C. jam¹) “yin”	⻖(阜) “mound”, 月 “moon”	— — — — —

	Character	Semantic	Phonetic
Traditional	陽 (M. yáng, C. joeng⁴) “yang”	⻖(阜) “mound”	昜 (M. yáng, C. joeng⁴)
Simplified	阳 (M. yáng, C. joeng⁴) “yang”	⻖(阜) “mound”, 日 “sun”	— — — — —

Yin and yang are semantically loaded words. Yin represents “the moon”, “dark”, “hidden”, “female”, “negative”; yang represents “the sun”, “bright”, “overt”, “male”, “positive”. In my opinion, the semantic replacements for their phonetic components in Simplified work very well.

Because the simplifications rarely took languages other than Mandarin into consideration, they may not always work well in other languages.

	Character	Semantic	Phonetic
Traditional	藝 (M. yì, C. ngai⁶, J. gē) “skill”	云 “speak”	蓺* (M. yì, C. ngai⁶, J. gē)
Simplified	艺 (M. yì, C. ngai⁶, J. gē) “skill”	艹 (艸) “grass”	乙 (M. yǐ, C. jyut³, J. otsu)

This particular phonetic replacement works extremely well in Mandarin because it has historically dropped initial “ng” (from 藝) and final “t” (from 乙) and undergone specific vowel mergers, none of which occurred in Cantonese. I also mention Japanese here to act as a second example because its loaned pronunciations come from older forms of spoken Chinese and often reflect those (although Japanese has undergone several of its own changes, of course). It also might be worth noting that the Japanese equivalent of this character removes the middle component (埶) to create 芸, which is also a completely separate character in Chinese (M. yún, C. wan⁴, “rue; rapeseed plant”).

*藝/蓺/埶 are all variant characters for the same word. Semantic components were gradually added to 埶, using it as a phonetic, but they all mean “skill” or “art”.

Characters that had their phonetics replaced by simpler components that are phonetically irrelevant (these characters often no longer fit into a 六書 liùshū group and their components cannot be considered semantic or phonetic).

·       標→标 biāo (票 piào → 示 shì)

·       際→际 jì (祭 jì → 示 shì)

·       層→层 céng (曾 céng → 云 yún)

·       壇→坛 tán (亶 dǎn → 云 yún)

A lot of the characters in this category had their phonetic components simplified to 又 yòu.

·       鄧→邓 dèng (traditional phonetic: 登 dēng)

·       僅→仅 jǐn (traditional phonetic: 堇 jǐn)

·       雞→鸡 jī (traditional phonetic: 奚 xī)

·       觀→观 guān, 歡→欢 huān, 權→权 quán, 勸→劝 quàn (trad. phonetic: 雚 guàn)

Essentially all of these are inconsistent with other characters of the same phonetic set. (Compare 鐙→镫, 謹→谨, 顴→颧.)

Often times characters’ phonetic components were not all simplified in the same way. This could be for a variety of reasons including (1) simplification was not necessary for other characters in that phonetic set, (2) simplifying other characters in that set the same way would fuse some with preexisting ones and create too many ambiguities, (3) some characters in that set work better with different phonetics from each other due to language changes. All of these are good reasons for inconsistencies that diverge from Traditional and show that the simplification process was not as arbitrary as some of its critics claim; however, there are also times when these inconsistencies don’t make as much sense. For example, the phonetic component 柬 (jiǎn) was simplified in some characters to its cursive version (a character that cannot be displayed independently but looks similar to 东 with an added horizontal stroke) but left alone in others, the logic of which is unclear (at least to me): 練→练 (liàn), 煉→炼 (liàn), 揀→拣 (jiǎn), but 諫→谏 (jiàn), 闌→阑 (lán).

Others still didn’t have the phonetic components entirely removed and replaced; instead, an arbitrary component including part of the phonetic was simplified, and the phonetic is obscured.

·       嘗→尝 cháng (traditional semantic: 旨 “aim”; trad. phonetic: 尚 shàng)

·       當→当 dāng (traditional semantic: 田 “field”; trad. phonetic: 尚 shàng)

And others were completely replaced with new characters, with no structural similarity to the original character.

·       蘭→兰 lán (traditional semantic: 艹 {艸} “grass”; trad. phonetic: 闌 lán)

All of the characters above, however, are fairly common in the language, and the benefits of the simplicity of the new forms were likely deemed to outweigh the benefit of having a component that indicates how it should be pronounced. (This is my guess – I don’t know what the people in charge were thinking when they made these.) Most of these are far more common than their phonetic components and learned before them so that the phonetic often doesn’t aid at all in the learning process and they are just memorized anyway. In fact, some of the phonetic components (like 堇 and 雚) are extremely obscure characters and not helpful to most people at all.

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In case you are wondering what my own personal opinion is on the Simplified vs Traditional debate, I am in favor of the simplification of Chinese characters, but not of Simplified characters (or at least, not all of them as they currently exist). I think the benefits for learning of a simpler system outweigh the benefits of the traditional structure of characters; however, I think Simplified Chinese has too many inconsistencies that break structure unnecessarily. An example is 盧 lú which is simplified to 卢 and many, many phonetic compounds follow this patterns (such as 壚→垆 lú), but in others, this was simplified to the phonetically less helpful 户 hù (爐→炉, 蘆→芦, 廬→庐) when all of these could have just as easily been 卢. Sometimes I think they could’ve simplified some characters even further than they did. To keep with this example, the character 盧 itself contains a (very obscure) phonetic component 𧆨, which is also found in 虜 lǔ and 慮 lǜ, but these were only simplified by removing 田 from their phonetic components (虏 and 虑). It would have been interesting to see their phonetics replaced with the simplified 卢, resulting in characters like ⿸卢力 and ⿸卢心.