Comment by numpad0
2 years ago
Simplification is just bad. It removes too much that it breaks ability for non-speakers to infer meanings. Complexity of letter shapes is irrelevant to ease of use in computer usage, so it's just a massive loss.
2 years ago
Simplification is just bad. It removes too much that it breaks ability for non-speakers to infer meanings. Complexity of letter shapes is irrelevant to ease of use in computer usage, so it's just a massive loss.
>it breaks ability for non-speakers to infer meanings
Not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that it's less convenient for people that don't speak / read Chinese? Why would that be a relevant metric?
You may be missing that character standards have changed over time and that different writing styles (草书，行书) are implicitly simplifications. You can think of latin or Russian cursive as a simplification of the printed letters.
In practice, the phonetic component has been mangled / evolved over time, so simplification doesn't make things more or less difficult for students (be it 5 year old native speakers or 50 year old non native speakers).
Worked out excellent for Korean (Hangul) though. Also English.
Both massive wins
I don't think it did for Korean, though I need input from speakers to be sure. From my experience, Korean MT routinely stops halfway through inputs and dumps nonsensical phonetic transcripts, likely from failing to identify words. I suspect they were just being complaisant to American influence in postwar years. Computers failing to even isolate and match words in this day and age is not a sign of an excellent working script.
Translation needs phonetic transcription to handle proper names. If there are words that may or may not be proper names depending on context, machine translation will guess the context wrong at least some of the time and phonetically transcribe what should be translated, or translate names that should be transcribed.
The problem also can also happen when translating from English, if you think about all the surnames that are occupations, or names like "bill" or "lily." Capitalization usually helps disambiguate, but there's title case and all caps and people who never capitalize anything...
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Simplified Chinese characters are already difficult enough for foreigners to learn. Making them learn traditional characters would just be sadistic.
Traditional characters is built on common parts for pronunciation and meaning cues. Simplified removed that so IMO it compresses worse and therefore harder. It's visually less dense, but, so what.
Those cues are there in exactly the same way in most simplified characters.
The cases where simplification has removed those cues are rare enough that the extra complexity of traditional characters is really not worth it.
I've never heard anyone claim that simplified characters are more difficult to learn, and it just seems false to me.