廢除繁體中文？ Abandon traditional Chinese characters?

昨天收到姐姐轉寄來，說聯合國要廢除繁體中文的網路謠言。轉寄來的信裡要求大家去一個網頁連署抗議。我去年就聽過這是個謠言。但趁這機會或許我應該把我對中國文字的想法分享一下。

Yesterday I received the forwarded internet rumor from my sister saying that the traditional Chinese characters will be abandoned by UN since 2008, and the email calls for people to cosign the statements of protestation on a web page. I already knew that this is a rumor last year. But this time it motivates me to write down what I thought about the traditional Chinese characters.

其實台灣官方已經不用「繁體中文」這個字眼，而改稱為「正體中文」了。雖然其中或許有些政治意義，但基本上我是很贊成這樣的稱呼的。

Actually officially in Taiwan, we do not use the term ``traditional Chinese characters'' anymore. (The Chinese version of this term should be more properly translated into English as the ``complicated Chinese characters'', in contrast with the ``simplified'' ones.) We call it the ``formal Chinese characters'' now. Although there must be some political issues in there, I basically agree with the idea to call them this way.

根據一般公認的歷史，中國文字的初次統一是在秦代。秦始皇要求全國「書同文、語同音、車同軌」。我相信語同音的政策並沒有貫徹，甚至根本沒有推行。以現代觀點來看，這些政策就是在一個統一的國家裡對某些重要「媒介」做標準化。

According to the generally accepted history of China, the first effort to unify the characters was in the Chin dynasty. Chin Shih Huang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang) requested that over the country people should use the same characters for writing, should speak in the same pronunciation, and should use cars (wagons or carriages) with the same distance between a pair of wheels. I think the policy of unifying the pronunciation was not carried through, if ever really tried to carry out. Anyway, from the modern point of view, this is a series of efforts to standardize some of the important `media' over a unified country.

然而秦代統一文字的方法，實在並非只是制訂一套固定數目的標準字集。根據漢代學者的記載，可以很清楚的了解到：秦人雖然對已經被使用的文字做了整理和刪併，提出了主要使用的官方文字，但更重要的是，他們是根據有系統、有原則的方法去整理這些文字。這些方法和原則，也就是周代以前即存在的「六書」。

However, the way that Chin people unified the characters is not simply to define a set of a fixed number of standard characters. According to the works of Han dynasty scholars, we can clearly see that, although Chin people did clean up, delete and combined characters from those that were in use here or there, and designed a set of official characters, more importantly, they did so with systematic methods. The principles of these methods were based on the so-call ``six categories of characters'' that existed as early as the Chou dynasty, or even earlier. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification)

訂定原則比訂定字集要來得重要的多，影響也的確深遠得多。秦代時所用的字集，後代有許多許多的增益。雖然從「標準字集」的觀點，這些增益是對標準字集的反叛；但實際上，增修的方法都是已經充分為學界及官方所承襲的正統方法。也就是說，新字主要都是根據六書，尤其是後四書的「形聲、會意、轉注、假借」等原則來產生的。即使是知識水準不必高的普普大眾，只要根據簡單的規則，都可以約略猜測生字所可能代表的意義。或許實際上這種臆測所能取得的文字意義的精確度，並不明顯地低於文字本身所承載的精確性，所以這樣的文字系統的運作方式，在中國的社會裡，幾千年來是相當成功的。

It is much more important to set up the rules than to set up the characters set, and the influence of the rules is indeed much more profound. There were many additions and modifications made over the Chin characters set over the centuries. From the viewpoint of a ``standard characters set'', these modifications are all rebellions. Yet in fact, the ways the characters set is enriched are all formal methods adopted by the academic circle and the governments. In other words, the additions are based on the six principles of characters classification, especially the principles of ``phono-semantic combination, indicative combination, derivation and borrowing.'' Even lay-people, having learned some simple rules, can roughly guess the meanings carried by an unfamiliar character. Perhaps, the accuracy of such conjectures is not much worse than the degree of precision carried by the characters themselves, and thus the characters system had been functioning successfully in Chinese society for more than two thousand years.

換一個角度來做結，可以說中國文字的演變，是依據一套堅實的規則自然演化的，所以才會獲得成功。光從中國的文字史，或許還不易看出這種規則的力量之強大。我們不妨看看日本人如何學習使用漢文字。日文中的漢字，一般都有音讀和訓讀兩類發音。音讀可能有一或少數種，而訓讀則可能有一或多種。常被舉出的例子像是「生」字。當它的文意不同時，有非常多的破音。另外，唐代當時日本的語言中修辭的豐富程度遠低於中文，因此一些抽象的字在日語中簡併度相當高。例如 yasu 一音可能對應「安、康、靖」等字，而 hide 一音可能對應「英、秀」等等， yoshi 可能是「吉、良、佳」等等， akira 可能是「光、明、朗、亮」等等。仔細分析日文中漢字的使用情形，可以發現當時自中國引進漢字到日本的留學生，不只是學寫了一套字，更充分掌握了把中文字運用到另一套口語語言的方法。這也表示，在唐代當時，中國學者對於自己的文字系統的精髓是瞭若指掌的。中文裡面的「溪、河、江」不就是不同方言裡的名詞嗎？收入同一個文字系統之後，不同方言使用者卻都可以理解這些字的意義。以這種「豐富詞彙」的鎔爐方式，以包容的方法來達到「語同音」，而不是禁止所有方言只准許講一種話。這種方式的確是使所有接近漢文化圈的不同文化漸漸以一起豐富的方式同化。再看日本的例子，藉由音讀，日本人學會了唐音(至少是近似的)，而藉由訓讀，其實漢字也得到了更豐富的內容。

To summarize in a different way of saying, the changes of the Chinese characters are natural revolution processes based on a solid set of rules. That is why it was very successful. It is not as easy to learn the power of these rules just by observing the history of characters in China. It may be instructive to look at how Japanese people learned to use `kanji' (which means Han characters). The pronunciations of each kanji in the Japanese language can usually be divided into `ondoku' and `kundoku'. There may be one or a few ondoku and one or several or even many kundoku for one kanji. The most cited example may be the kanji 生. According to its meaning in the context, there are many different ways of pronouncing it. Meanwhile, since the rhetoric part of the Japanese language at the Tang dynasty ages was not as rich as the Chinese language, many of the rhetoric characters in Chinese became degenerate in Japanese pronunciation. For example, `yasu' which means peace or happiness in Japanese corresponds to kanji 安 or 康 or 靖, etc.; `hide' which means elegance corresponds to 英 or 秀, etc.; `yoshi' which means good corresponds to kanji 吉 or 良 or 佳, etc.; `akira' which means brightness corresponds to kanji 光 or 明 or 朗 or 亮, etc. Analyzing the way kanji is used in Japanese, it is easy to see that those Japanese overseas students in China at that time not only learned a huge character-set from China, they also learned very well the ways to apply the rules to a different spoken language. This also implies that the Chinese scholars at that time knew very well the essence of their characters system. In Chinese, the characters 溪 and 河 and 江 which all means river were originally the noun corresponding to the same thing in different dialects. By putting them into the written language with the character construction rules, people speaking different dialects can all understand what the written symbols originated from other dialects correspond to. Enriching the `written vocabulary' in this way, the goal of unifying the pronunciation was gradually achieved by including pronunciations from all different cultures into the same language instead of forbidding to speak dialects. Actually, the cultures of those societies near the Han cultural circle (including the Han culture itself) were enriched together, and adoption happened naturally between these cultures. Coming back to the example of Japanese culture, by using ondoku, Japanese people learned, at least approximately, the Tang pronunciations of Chinese language; by using kundoku, the kanji or Chinese characters gained wider application.

中文字的一個重要特色是一個字攜帶一個意涵。再加上中文的文法很自由，即使把一句話裡的各要素順序調換，往往也不會嚴重影響理解，這使得中文是現今世上仍廣為使用的文字之中，最適合做為「世界語」的文字。意即，如果所有人都學習中文字，即使他們用自己語言的文法去組織寫下的句子，只要經過適當調適，講不同語言的人都應可看懂別人所寫的文句的意思。就好像過去日本人可以用中文字寫官方文書一樣。同時這也是為何很多西方書籍的中譯本唸起來好像是把西方語句硬翻，而我們只是覺得翻得很糟、很不順口，卻往往還是照樣能看懂。如果中文字演變和運用的法則可以得到正確的保存和宣揚，不僅原先在漢文化圈的領導地位依然存在，更可能在世界上扮演積極的溝通媒介的角色。中文原先有非常堅實的優點，主要原因就是根據了一套優異的運用規則。從今天的術語來說，中文字過去的沿革是根據一套「演化式規則」。然而中國共產黨政權推行簡體字的手法，是無視於這種活的規則的優越性，而用蠻力的方法去摧毀舊中文字的系統。我個人並不是反對把中文字做一定程度的簡化。事實上簡字自然會出現在我們的文化中。隨時間過去，約定俗成的力量，會使得那些在既有規則中仍能自圓的改變留存在中文字系統中。這樣得來的簡字，的確會在不影響中文字的威力之下，改善中文字的易用程度。我個人覺得，中國推行簡體字的手法，不需要我們用政治觀點或其它論點去批判。中國人自己把自己家裡珍貴的寶物毀掉，他們所損失的，遠遠超過別人的批評所可能帶來的損害。

One of the characteristics of Chinese characters is that one character carries a complete meaning on its own. Combining with the fact that the grammar rules of Chinese written language are very loose, one can often permute the elements in a sentence without influencing the comprehension of that sentence much. This makes written Chinese language the best candidate of a ``world language'' among all actively used written languages nowadays. That is, if everybody learns Chinese characters, and he writes down the sentences he speaks in Chinese characters according to the grammar of his own language, other people could still easily understand what he writes after some adjustment. This is exactly how Japanese people were able to write official documents totally in Chinese in the old time. This is also why many Chinese translations of writings in western languages read very influent because they look like a direct conversion of sentences of western languages into Chinese, but very often we can still fully understand what they are saying. If the rules of evolution and application of Chinese characters can be preserved and even promoted properly, not only that it can retain its superiority in the Han cultural circle, but it can also play a positive role as the communication media in the whole world. This is just because of the superior rules adopted by the Chinese written language system. With the modern terminology, we can say that the past changes in Chinese characters followed a set of ``generic rules.'' However, the Chinese Communists ignored the superiority of these lively rules and destroyed the Chinese characters system with brutal force. Personally, I am not against the suggestions of simplifying the existing characters set to some extent. In fact, simplified characters spontaneously emerged from time to time. As time passes by, those simplifications that are reasonably compatible with the rules will remain in the actively used characters set through the mechanism of convention. Such simplifications will shorten the learning curve and will make the characters set more user-friendly without sacrificing the power of the rules behind the system. Personally, I think we do not have to criticize the manner in which the simplified characters set was introduced from a political point of view. It is a bloody truth that, by destroying the treasurable they had at hand, the Chinese people have lost far more than the damage of any criticism could possibly do to them.

台灣人由於受到國民黨的統治，有四五十年的時間裡，大部分的人被洗腦，因而把維護漢文化視為己任。我想絕對沒有人可以反駁：至少在中國改革開放、台灣自我本位意識抬頭的年代之前，台灣是世界上唯一積極保存漢文化的地區。其它的政治問題姑且不在此扯出來談。如果中國到現在還不積極去追上腳步、恢復自己的文化資產，還要來打壓台灣使用的文字，那真是在文化上徹底的自絕了。這樣，誰會是漢文化衰敗的大罪人呢？我想是不言自明的問題。然而不能諱言的，台灣現在也面臨同樣的問題。即使強調台灣文化的本體性，也不能蠻橫地忽略：台灣文化的提升，原本就有相當大的成分是依靠與漢文化的同化。台灣語言的本土性，與使用漢文字，是不相違背，也無法分割的。更重要的是，那就是台灣先民的遺跡，是台灣歷史真實的一部分。這也和我們是否願意接受現在的中國政權和中國意識無關。甚至可以說，現在台灣的文化，是比現在的中國的文化還要純正的漢文化。保留我們歷史上累積的漢文化的長處，應該是對台灣歷史負責、對台灣文化的優越性有益的作為，而不必被視為是對現在的中國靠攏。重要的是台灣如何自我提升，並幫助全世界一起提升。

Being governed by KMT after the World War II, for at least forty to fifty years, most of the Taiwanese people were brain-washed to take as their responsibility to preserve Han culture. I think it un-debatable that, at least before China evolved to be more open, and before Taiwanese people became aware of the identity of Taiwan, Taiwan was the only region in the world in which Han culture was actively preserved. Let us forget about other political problems at the moment. If China does not try to catch up in recovering their cultural assets, and moreover it tries to suppress the characters used in Taiwan, then China is absolutely hopeless in terms of its own culture. In that case, it goes without saying who is to be blamed for the corrosion of Han culture. However, I also would not scruple to say that Taiwan is facing a similar problem now. Even if we are emphasizing on the identity of Taiwanese culture, we cannot arbitrarily ignore the fact that the advances of Taiwanese culture, in a large part, were due to the assimilation with Han culture. The localization of Taiwanese language does not go against the employment of Chinese characters, and Chinese characters are not separable from Taiwanese language now. More importantly, it is a part of the real history of Taiwan, it is a part of the remnants of Taiwanese ancestors, to use the Chinese characters. This is nothing to do with whether or not we are in favor of the present Chinese government or Chinese consciousness. We can even say that the present Taiwan culture is a more genuine Han culture than the present `China' culture. It is beneficial to the superiority of Taiwanese culture and is an act to be honest to the Taiwanese history, to preserve the good part of Han culture accumulate in our culture. We do not have to take it as leaning towards the side of the present China government. The important thing is to improve ourselves and to help the world to improve.