Chinese Characters are AWESOME and we should use them for English
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 พ.ค. 2024
- Does anyone else find it more than a little weird that we call Chinese Characters "Chinese characters" but when you use them to right Japanese, they're called Kanji? That just feels like favoritism, especially considering Kanji literally means "chinese characters," but what do I know.
www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary
www.strokeorder.info/
studycli.org/chinese-characte...
www.dailyzhongwen.com/2022/05...
0:00 Chinese characters are AWESOME
0:20 Alphabet
1:27 Logography
2:37 6 types of Characters
5:57 We should, but we can't
6:22 Because Chinese has weird grammar
7:19 Because Chinese has weird syntax
8:07 Because Chinese has weird morphology
9:33 But, if I had to...
10:08 And Prosian
10:59 And Polish
Corrections:
长 *can* be read as Long/Straight, but in the compound 成长, the correct reading is Growing/Growth, and it could definitely be used on it's own to mean "to grow"
Yes, 萌 already exists, yes it's an anime thing, yes my calligraphy sucks, yes I keep pronouncing tone 2 like tone 1 and tone 3 like tone 2, yes my calligraphy REALLY sucks
萌's literal meaning is the bud of a plant. It also means the start of growth. The anime meaning is from the japanese word 萌え （もえ）and the originally meaning of 萌え is the same as the ones of 萌
You have realised this and
I think you mistook pinyin tone markers for being the same as those in IPA sometimes
pinyin ā á ǎ à actually correspond to IPA á ǎ à(/àˀá) â
but the fact that you were able to pronounce tones is a great achievement already (unless you are a native tonal language speaker already but still, they're prolly different to those of Mandarin)
成長 is literally just "become long"
@@kaderen8461 長 also means "old" in Chinese. As in "長者" (elderly) and "年長" (old, as in someone's age)
honestly i think that chinese characters would rock for english since theres so many dialectally inconsistent words that a clean alphabet cant be made
The only way to make a dialect independent alphabet for English that actually reflects pronunciation is to make it phonemic rather than phonetic. It would be impossible to unambiguously tell how a word is spelt from how you'd say it, but it _should_ be possible to pronounce a word just from its spelling. Even this however isn't perfect since some words actually use different phonemes in different accents.
@@angeldude101So long as you undo all the mergers and accommodate for all the splits, I think you could make an interdialectical phonemic writing system, since almost every phoneme has a 1:1 equivalent. The only hard part would be the vowels in trap/bath/bad/palm/lot/cloth/thought, which split in different ways in American/British/Australian dialects (and even then, you’d just have 7 ways to write 2-4 different sounds, which is no worse than the current system).
@@angeldude101inb4 americans have to memorize to spell last as lāst bc bri ish people pronounce it differently but also put a line through ['s] in "he's mad" bc AAVE can drop contracted auxiliaries
@@angeldude101the thing is, even then there would still be ambiguities, like 'peas' and 'peace'. they contain all of the same phonemes /p/, /i(ː)/, and /s/. but treating the /s/ as a morpheme affects the pronunciation drastically
@@penguinlim I don't know about other accents, but those two words aren't homophones for me. One has a /s/ and the other has a /z/. (There are other words that are definitely homophones, and no phonetic alphabet can distinguish homophones just by their nature.)
Ok, this one was just painful to watch...if you're language didn't undergo the exact same phonological changes as Mandarin Chinese, it's basically just a regloss of English. But what should I expect from modern Zzineohp videos, which are essentially just more Chinese propaganda. Depressing, really...
I always say that Ancient Egyptian is a regloss of English!
My man made a video on morphology and then wrote "you're language".. I'm sorry you're cool keep it up
The dementia is getting worse 😭
huh, an interesting tactic indeed! If you hate your own video, then people will feel like they don't have to, reverse psychology riiiiight? lmao
You can use Chinese language and you can live there.
I do really want to see what a Japanese style mix of the Latin alphabet and Chinese characters would be like.
Something like "私 am 行ing to 学校."
I think they're actually are some minority languages in southern China that do that
Could you do a video about that?
the pronounciation on that is so funny lmao
@@ChrizPatatoz for real hahahahaha. It should be pronounced with the english pronunciation but my brain does not follow through at all
I basically already talk like that at home with my family 😂
btw you should try to make a cursive cyrillic script for polish
I hate cursive Cyrillic the T looks like a M
bro want to replicate chtulhu by writing
@@zzineohp skill issue
it's easy, there are multiple versions, and new ones are constantly being created from scratch by bored Polish linguistics students during lengthy lectures
@@zzineohp Latin is an objectively worse set.
Can't believe you're using Zhengzhang instead of Baxter-Sagart. Kids these days…
More seriously, 長 zhǎng is actually the word that means "to grow". 長 cháng is the word that means "long". They can be traced back to Old Chinese \*/Cə.ntraŋ/ and \*/traŋʔ/ respectively, both derived from 張 \*/traŋ/ > zhāng, meaning "to make long". Old Chinese is actually full of derivational morphology.
well that makes things easier
I love the off-the-walls linguistics you always pull off, it's always equal parts entertaining, fasinating, and educational
you may be interested in learning about Vietnamese Chu Nom as a basis for creating new Han characters for things
Vietnamese here, not an expert but chu Nom (Southern characters) character is created by basically combining the Hanzi character that have the same meaning and the Hanzi character that have the same pronunciation. Words borrowed from China stay written in Hanzi
Not really, Chữ Nôm is literally useless if you don't already know Chinese characters, it was very inefficient and only has historical values. Chữ Quốc Ngữ is really a blessing despite its origin
you keep reading 形 as high flat, it's supposed to be a rising tone 'xíng'
4:53 your pronunciation of 'xiu' is just nonsensical
6:31 7:38 work on your rising tone bro. rising 'chéng', not high flat tone
7:43 長 does mean 'grow' on its own, when read as 'zhǎng. The 'long' meaning is when read as 'cháng'.
and fyi 成長 'chéng zhǎng' means 'to grow up' as in 'to mature (mentally)'
'to grow (physically)' would be 長大 'grow-big' or just 長 'grow'
9:59 明 'míng' is rising, not high flat
so since the 長 allegedly comes from pictogram of long hair, the 成長 can be then translated as 'becoming long'?
Rising tone is hard okay
@@zzineohptip for you: what you're doing as tone 3 (dipping) is actually closer to a tone 2 (rising). Use that for your tone 2 and work on your tone 3 (mostly low flat unless followed by another tone 3).
Your 'zhǎng' is very close to an actual 'zháng'
@@zzineohp And add some creak to your tone 3! Or just do a low tone.
@@zzineohp pinyin simplifies the sequences "iou" and "uei" to "iu" and "ui", so xiu is pronounced xiou, just like how shui is pronounced as shuei
8:55 That pronounciation of Rosnę made me die inside.
i have a stuffed nose
You could also draw inspiration from other chinese languages. Cantonese uses 緊 for whats basically 'ing'
I am growing -> 我長緊
and while we're at it, cantonese can use just 長 for 'grow'
so
我是長緊 would be pretty intelligible for a cantonese speaker
Abjad is not named after Arabic's first four letters. The first four letters roughly correspond to A, B, T (but with the tongue pressed against the back of the top teeth and flatter), and Th as in thing, but when listing things (and I guess for other purposes), a completely separate sequence is used.
I think Abtath is the modern sequence, they reordered it by shape. Abjad is the original one back from when the word was coined
@@zzineohpYou're much closer when you describe 'abugida' as "translated" into Ethiopic. Both abjad and 'abugida' are based on the first four aramaic letters (אבגד)--'bj'd takes the Arabic pronunciation of those characters, while äbugida uses Ge'ez sound order. Neither name is taken directly from the first four letters in either language.
@@zzineohp There are three ways to arrange Arabic "Alphabet"
One, like other Semitic languages, The abjad
أبجد هوز حطي كلمن سعفص قرشت ثخذ ضظغ
The second one, and the most popular is the Alef Ba' Ta' Tha' ect. Called "هجائي"
The Third's arranged according to the sound of the letter, and there are four variations for this system, whether it starts from the throat and ends with lips (and the spectrum between the both) which is Al-Farahidi's
ع، ح، هـ، خ، غ، ق، ك، ج، ش، ض، ص، س، ز، ط، ت، د، ظ، ذ، ث، ر، ل، ن، ف، ب، م، و، ي، أ.
The second being ibn jinni's, and the rest are modern ones.
Beside, The Prophet's (PBUH) joke was funny tbh
I had this idea once when I realised how isolating English is.
At least for a language like Chinese it would not make sense to use any other kind of script.
How about writing English with Egyptian characters? At least there is some cultural conntections in America.
So basically you are creating a kind of Chữ Nôm for Prosian?
I wanted to write English a lot of weird ways, but I did see a video someone else made called "Writing English With Writing Systems You're Not Supposed To," and I don't want to step on their toes.
Although I did just watch it, and it looks like they only did 3 different alphabets, so I'll add it to the list of ideas.
I’ve been using mixed writings in my English writing. English for conjugations & 漢字 for various other purposes. I’ve been thinking of ways to do this in a more “standard” way rather than writing whichever feels better in the moment
"as long as you memorize 1500000 meanings for several thousands characters..."
yeah, that's the whole issue
It’s not thhhat bad. I mean hundreds of millions of speakers already do that today
@@tonydai782 actually, not all chinese speakers know the character, like in rural areas people would only need to know around 3000 characters. You may think "they must have their way because they grew up in the language" but no, students are just as confused as an foreigner learning it
@@tonydai782 yes ok but they start as kids,when their brain is a language sponge
@@lorefox201I learned 5000 in 6 months when I was 37 and my IQ is just 80, is more method than study time
I am making such a system for english but for every character there is immense etymological research behind it. The characters are going to be primarily phono-semantic and will have a higher level of "purity" similar to seal script characters instead of the increasingly formatted and simplified chinese standard script. If you guys want to understand the process then search the channel "understanding chinese characters" and look for a phonetic series explanation video. I will be replicating the creation of them all over again like this for english. For inflections and such, i will do a hybrid solution similar to japanese kana (probably using normal latin letters tbh).
great, creative video. loved every second :)
I only speak Japanese but one could consider 実, 栄, 伸, 積, 茂,繁, 育 or even 生 (at least in Japanese) for grow. There are plenty of possibilities. Though 萌 fits well, given it can mean "sprout", which is a type of growing, whilst being based on 明 "glow" (or bright) which is phonologically close to "grow".
Though many modern Chinese words feature many two character compounds in writing (also exported to other languages) older Chinese texts feature single characters for singular concepts much more often. You might want to look into those texts for inspiration. Also consider other languages in the 漢字文化圏. Some words and characters may have become unfashionable or obsolete in Chinese, while retained in Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese writing (Korean and Vietnamese don't use them anymore but you can still find sources, especially for Korean).
additionally, in china it's used to refer to anime girls
@@alexwang982 Oh, same in Japanese like in 萌え萌えキュン (moe moe kyun) or 萌える (moeru) when something cute captivates you. I suspect this meaning might be a loan from Japanese.
@@Ennocb it is
Wot de fuuuuk, mate?
4, falling tone = Wot!
3, low tone = the fuuuuuuk... (long vowel like in Latin)
2, rising tone = mate?
Truly, cockney is the pinnacle of linguistics
The advantages of an alphabet are that it represents how you say the words, and ut requires very few symbols.
Your pronunciation made me chuckle in a good way, respectfully, as I am chinese
hate to be the kinda person who you're making fun of with those screenshotted comments but. at 4:27, the one above is bǎi (3rd tone), the one below is also bǎi, and the one to the right is usually bó but when looking this up to fact check I found out it has an alternative pronunciation of bǎi (again, 3rd tone) all of which are not bái (2nd tone). so even though your point was valid i felt the need to be pedantic
10:02 明 is missing a line
I'm going to use the excuse that these are transfer characters
just came from the main Prosian video and this one was very cool! I have ideas about the historical plausibility of Prosian adopting Simplified Hanzi but right now I need to say this:
People are mad about 萌 and I think they are WRONG. I actually think it would be very elegant to use 萌. 萌(méng) has meant “to sprout” in Chinese for a long time, and this definition is still used A LOT, usually in 萌芽 but also 萌发 and 萌动. It can plausibly imply “to grow” as well, because the concepts are closely related.
The anime-related definition only came from Chinese weebs adopting the kanji part of 萌え. The etymology of 萌え is a mystery. The Chinese 萌 was also adopted by mainstream culture, and its meaning expanded to just “cute” in general. It stopped being just weeb slang a while ago. (I watched it happen. )
It’s really an amazing coincidence that you tried to coin something “phono”-semantically and ended up with the character that means “to sprout”. It’s kinda like one of those cases where a translation is both phonetic AND semantic (e.g. 眸冷骨累* melancholy), but for this one it’s both a “phono”-semantic and semantic adoption of a Chinese character.
A Chinese speaker will NOT look at 萌 in this context and think cute anime girls. A Japanese speaker might, an English speaking weeb might, but you can’t please everybody, and using 萌 is not just plausible but actively pleasing to Chinese speakers. So I say ignore the weebs.
*móu lěng gǔ lèi, literally “eyes cold bones tired”
We already have a logogram for English. It’s called emojis 😌
Do you have a historical backstory for how this language adopted Chinese characters?
they were in China when they needed a writing system?
Those vine booms startled me lmao
Oh, boy... do I have some notes. Let me get back to you in a month from now.
10:03 japanese have a kanji like that is this 萌(moe) it's like a cutesy anime term but yea japanese has the character for that
ah
awkward
I suppose i will replace the grass radical with a tree radical
@@zzineohpthe character 萌 means "sprout/grow" anyways, so coincidentally it kind of fits!
@@zzineohp I mean like in Chinese 萌 exist, and its original meaning is 'to germinate' or 'sprout'. but somehow it means "cute" in Japanese so now in Chinese ,it have kind of two means. So I guess you are basically right about the 萌 thing by taking it as growing...
@@zzineohp yea maybe, but it's still good I can't believe that there was that coincidence氵(> >
Don't know why my comment is deleted but yea it's fine but yea you maybe consider changing it to not get confused but it's not a joyo kanji so most bi linguals don't know
And apparently you don’t even need to create a character for …ing, just use 在. And use 是 for “am”, and just write I am growing as 我是成长在. The dialect of Chinese my parents are speaking *do* contains a …ing suffix that is actually written 在 and pronounced. Apparently it could be a feature of 江淮官话 which is a dialect group of Chinese, but I’m not really sure.
Congrats on the more popular video!
you can just use phonetic approximates for words/affixes that doesn't map nicely to Chinese. So just map one single word, say 唵 an, for all cases of 'am'. the mouth radical could indicate that it serves a grammatical function rather. it also probably sounded closer to English 'am' when pronounced in Middle Chinese.
for the -ing, you could find a phonetic approximate such as 𠸄 ying, or us something like 中 for its meaning 'during, while'.
so the sentence: I am growing. would be 我唵长𠸄/中.
also, i think it's best to use classical chinese as the basis for these projects, as it has a better one to one correspondence between morphemes and glyphs. Classical Chinese syntax is basically modern Chinese morphology.
I moved to Shanghai for work and don't speak any Mandarin (well, maybe a little). This is how I think about characters. I find it easier to remember the meaning than the sounds and tones. So when I read signs on the metro or anywhere I get what it's saying in the languages I speak, but cannot read it in Chinese
Omizan Sakamoto has once made a TH-cam video describing a conlang "what if middle English borrowed Chinese, just like Japanese Korean and Vietnamese did?"
You might be interested in it.
Check out "If English were Chinese-character language"
meaning is not it's morphological component but it's lexical component
Well in an isolating language they're the same
日全欧洲学习中文，将匕新时代与天下大吉。
长 (cháng) is long or starigt (adj.), and 长 (zhǎng) is old (adj.) or grow (v.).
I'm growing, I'm becoming older
Also you do know 萌 (méng) already means "to grow" right
I can't believe I've stumbled upon someone who obsesses (couldn't find a better word) over chinese characters (and by extension etymology) as much as I do.
chinese characters are pretty neat. i'm glad to see someone else appreciating how neat they are. it's kind of interesting to note that a chinese professor once used the term "kanji" when talking to me about chinese characters being used to write chinese, so some people at least just use "kanji" as a general term for the characters
The video should be about 50% louder or so, i strugle hearing it through speakers
失 矢 are 转注字
That was brilliant
i wonder how many people went "abjad isnt named after arabics first letters its alif ba ta duMBASS"
10/10 my brain has melted
there are so many things wrong here
first of all, traditional characters are also used in Hong Kong and Macau
at 3:49 水 is written incorrectly
4:07 where did you get this number? Cantonese only has around 1800 syllables
7:38 成长 means to grow, 成 means to become and 长 means to grow in this context and its pronounced zhǎng or ㄓㄤˇ
9:58 明 is missing a stroke
10:56 种 means to grow a plant, aka to plant something
I apologized for bad calligraphy
The voice is so quiet
Yes.
2:41 嘴 * This video really should have a lot of asterisks. I understand its supposed to be a very basic review but it seems a bit misleading...
mouth of river still counts
Mandarin: 脚
Hokkien: 胶
English: ⿰⺼卯 (Phonetic egg, Semantic flesh)
Forgot to say that this means leg. Of course, the English one is made up.
Genius
*Looks at pfp.*
When Sundaes attack.
The autistic energy radiating from this channel is immense
Liked and subscribed
9:08 mom im in a youtube video
I wouldn't use the latin alphabet for Polish either tbh
Wszyszcz
At this point you are kinda just describing japanese but SVO
English writing is so historical anyway, so might as well
LMFAO FOR ALL CHARACTERS TO CHOOSE FOR "to grow" you chose 萌 ...
萌 is like the stuff anime fans in china say to refer to their anime girlfriends
aiight so we switching the grass radical out for the tree radical
@@zzineohp yeah theres a website called 萌娘 which is a weeb forum
Why are you writing out the chinese characters in the 6 types of characters section if you're going to write them wrong? 3:52 the swoop on the middle line of 水 is facing the wrong direction. Also your pronounciation can be really worked on...
I'm coming after you.
You mean the place where people are named Pee Poo?
No, Prosian is a language I made up, ( it's isn't real )
@@zzineohp if you like china so much why don’t you live there
@@ErenDoppleganer no grass
@@ErenDoppleganer Just because you’re into Chinese linguistics doesn’t you also want to move there. What kind of leap is that??
Holy crap I did not intend this comment to be this long. Apologies for it!
I’ll be honest, I’m usually a fan of Chinese characters who advocates for their use in the languages that use them. The problem is that they absolutely do not work with English.
It’s like putting a square shape in a circular hole. Sure you can force it in, but it doesn’t fit nicely. Chinese evolved with Chinese characters in mind, so they fit really nicely! In language that use(d) them like Korean*2 and Japanese, they’re a little bit more awkward, but still alright mainly because they were introduced much earlier into the languages’ evolution, allowing them to develop while using them.
Writing English with solely Chinese characters sounds like a terrible idea. The only real reason Korean*2 and Japanese can/could get away with using them is because they had complementary writing systems to go along with them. And Japanese only needs to conjugate verbs, so the characters already fit pretty well into the language. But the biggest problem is that English conjugates way more*1 than both Japanese and (I think) Korean*2
Take English pronouns for example, let’s map them out to Chinese characters!
I - 我
You - 你
He - 他
She - 她
It - 他
Great! That was easy…. right? Well I did leave out plural pronouns, but we can represent them by adding 们 to the end of them like in Chinese.
We - 我们
You - 你们
They - 他们
Looking good… right? Well now we get to conjugate them! Possessive is easy, just add 的 to them
My - 我的
Our - 我们的
Your - 你的/你们的
His - 他的
Her - 她的
Its - 他的
Their - 他们的
Nice! Now we just have to add the direct object forms to this list and… we have a problem. We could just add another character to form the object form… except Chinese doesn’t have a character for that! So what do we do? We could make our own, or reappropriate another character for this purpose. I decided to use the character 宾*3
Me - 我宾
Mine - 我的宾
Us - 我们宾
Ours - 我们的宾
You - 你宾/你们宾
Yours - 你的/你们的宾
Him - 他宾
His - 他的宾
Her - 她宾
Hers - 她的宾
It - 他宾
Its - 他的宾
Them - 他们宾
Theirs - 他们的宾
That covers pronouns right? Well it does, but now we can move on to the pros and cons with this system.
For the pros, It created a written distinction between some identical pronouns, and it regulates pronoun spelling.
For the cons, oh boy. First of all, it creates ambiguity. I.E. there’s no difference between he and it, which is normally a pretty important distinction in English. Second of all, this is just terrible for writing. In order to write “theirs” in English, it’s just 8 strokes. But in the system I described (他们的宾) it would take a minimum whopping 27 strokes!*4 This is painful for physical writing, and it doesn’t look particularly neat either.
What if instead we make a unique character for each conjunction? Then you’d have to learn to write 29 different characters, just for pronouns! Which is really cumbersome. Or what if we just don’t care about conjugation at all? Well then we’d be getting a worse writing system for English and loosing written meaning on top of that!
Another solution is to have English be written with a hybrid script, like Japanese and Korean*2. But English doesn’t cleanly conjugate with just prefixes as suffixes. There’s no real way to write the pronouns with just a prefix or a suffix. So why don’t we write pronouns with JUST the hybrid non-logographic script? Well at that point why even bother with anything when we can just use that script? And I think this comes back to the main problem here.
Why do we need this?
I’ve seen people say that English spelling is so bad that we might as well go to Chinese characters. But this take is odd to me. With English spelling you can at minimum GUESS the pronunciation of a word, but like this video demonstrates you can’t really do that with Chinese. Chinese characters are also much more complex (on average) than even the English words with the weirdest spelling. This feels like an absolutely absurd overcorrection that overlooks the much easier solution of just making a decent spelling reform.
There’s no real reason to spell English with Chinese characters. It doesn’t help to solve any real problems the existing system has, and when it does fix some problems, it creates its own new ones that are (arguably) worse than the ones it fixed.
Thinking about writing English with Chinese letters is a fun thought experiment! But asserting that English SHOULD be written with them is just utterly silly in my opinion.
Did I take a video probably meant more as a joke way too seriously? Yeah.
Did I waste 45 minutes writing a comment the creator probably won’t see? Uh-huh.
Am I mentally okay? Probably not.
Tl;dr Chinese characters are AWESOME! But they probably shouldn’t be used for English
*1 I’m saying that English conjugates more overall, not that English conjugation is more complex than languages like Japanese (Japanese verbs put English ones to shame)
*2 I don’t speak nor have I studied Korean, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. I’m most likely wrong. I’m also aware that (as of writing this) Korean has mostly phased out Chinese characters, I’m just using it for a second example.
*3 宾 is the first letter in 宾语, the Chinese word for a direct object. It also (according to wiktionary) has the definition of a grammatical object with it, so I figured it’d be best used in this case.
*4 I am aware that written Chinese often has strokes blended together to reduce stroke count, and some characters like 的 are almost written completely differently. But even so, “他们的宾” is way more obtuse than “theirs”
Well I feel like in English, noting down the case of a noun is unimportant. Especially in languages with a rigid sentence order, you can typically figure out what context a word is being used in from, well, context.
Yes, using Chinese characters for English is probably not a great idea. But using a logogtaphy in general? I wouldn't be opposed.
@@zzineohp I actually agree that English using a logographic writing system isn’t a terrible idea, but it would have to be made with english in mind. Thanks for your reply and sorry for the long comment 😅
“Chinese evolved with Chinese characters in mind” man it’s so much more complicated than that tho. the relationship between Chinese languages and Chinese characters involves a LONG history of inequality, geopolitics and the work of linguists and writers. The nice compatibility of Standard Mandarin/Simplified Chinese that we have now is the result of a lot of changes from both sides. ik that this doesn’t disprove your main argument, but it might have implications on how a Chinese-based writing system CAN evolve to be more compatible with English I think.
If you ever love to learn Chinese characters, learn the Traditional version instead of the simplified form.
And there are multiple erroneous (or weird/horrible) pronunciations and interpretations. Please ask some native people to check the contents before you post the video clip since it is meant to be educational.
look i fucked up xiu and my tone 2 sounds like 3. Its not like I messed up that bad
no
zhengzhang >> baxter 😎😎
Well, you helped me understand Chinese. Still have to learn all the caraters by heart tho.😢
i can't hear shit
also maybe before you USE chinese characters you should LEARN chinese characters
like at least get the tones right man
I'm coming for you.
Omg strike that pose
freaky pose
ℭ𝔬𝔯𝔯𝔢𝔠𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫:
Fun fact, you're wrong. There are three standards of Chinese characters (, there are more... technically). Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, and Japanese standard.
𝔖𝔦𝔪𝔭𝔩𝔦𝔣𝔦𝔢𝔡 𝔳𝔰 𝔗𝔯𝔞𝔡𝔦𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫𝔞𝔩:
A narrative I want to correct is the the history of characters, which is more complex than simplified are newer and traditional are older. Most simplified characters come from 俗体字（su ti zi）meaning nonstandard character. This is like how English 'cause' can be spelled 'cuz', the mainland Chinese government didn't make many new characters. They just standardized the simpler spellings.
In some instances, the simplified character is older than the traditional one. Take 云（yun）meaning cloud, the traditional one is 雲，this is a combination of two characters 雨 and 云. What 雨（yu）means is rain, but what it means in this character is this character means something relating to the sky or weather. That why 雨 is in 雪雷雾霜 (characters relating to weather). However 云 was made first, and had the meaning, 雨, added later.
This is the main difference between simplified and traditional. Traditional is just the standard that old scholars used in professional work (which attempted to add meaning by categorizing everything), while simplified was used in nonprofessional settings. Neither is older than the other, they're both evolutions of the same system.
Most Chinese get this wrong because it's become a political subject, however both are wrong in this area because all it is, is a different standard of the same system.
𝔈𝔵𝔞𝔪𝔭𝔩𝔢𝔰:
While I have you here I'll quicky show some examples:
Simple first, traditional second, Japanese third (if at all)
认 vs 認（ren), just had the radical 訁simplfied to 讠(meaning words or speech) and the sound part 忍（ren）canged to 人（ren (different tone). Two parts made with less strokes
马 vs 馬（ma), is just more simple
电 vs 電（dian), had the 雨 removed
无 vs 無（wu), looks completely different
气 vs 氣 vs 気（qi), sometime Japan does it's own thing. Instead of removing the part, Japan makes in an X.
龙 vs 龍 vs 竜（long), and other times Japan just makes something up.
𝔍𝔞𝔭𝔞𝔫𝔢𝔰𝔢 𝔖𝔱𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔞𝔯𝔡:
Last thing, on the topic of Japanese simplification. It's cursed.
The Japanese government wanted to simplify their characters, and after WWII the simplification took into action. This simplification had two aim: reduce the number of characters, and make those remaining characters simpler. These were 2000 kanji called joyo kanji. These were the only kanji that would be used in writing, and the more complex ones were simplified. Sometime they copied Chinese simplification, sometimes not.
Example: they changed 龍 to 竜, so in character like 瀧 were changed to 滝.
This created a problem within Japanese writing. That being, Japanese has a lot of homonyms. So some when some kanji (which were not part of the 2000 joyo kanji,) had their kanji replaced other kanji with the same sound, or the kanji would more commonly replaced with kana.
After a bit, people realized they needed more kanji. So they brought back the other ones they removed. But, they never applied the simplification to the new kanji. So you have 龍 to 竜, but they never changed the 龍 within 襲 because the kanji was not part of the simplification. This is way Japanese is hard. It's a mix of simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and Japanese standards.
If you want to learn more about how cursed Japanese kanji are, watch Lazy Fluency video called "The Kanji Iceberg Explained"
I am now sleepy, thank you from reading (whoever did). I am sleepy and will take a shower.
- goodbye
I would like to second that there are more than two character sets. As far as I know the traditional characters in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and likely Vietnam also have slight variations, though they are mostly identical. On top of that there are two simplified standards, with their own variants. There are at least 7 different kanji sets, though only 4 of them are actually in official use.
Simplified Chinese has many of the same inconsistencies you described for Japanese.
金 is simplified in 钱 or 银 but not in 鎔 because someone wanted it in their name. I also find it wild how some characters got merged like the 穀 in 穀物 now being 谷. But that's preference.
Also, as far as I know, the initial simplification efforts for Japanese kanji started several years before Chinese simplification policies. I suspect that rather than one copying the other, the same common shorthands happened to be standardized independently of one another.
? 海 is a jōyō kanji and was never removed from the standard, and it is written using the 毋 glyph, not 母. the 毋 form is Always used when writing shinjitai kanji, and 母 is only used by itself or in hyōgaiji (which aren't standard anyway)
@@lyrasfsfsfsfsfs You're right. I should have checked the list but I just went off what was on the top of my brain. An actual example of this would be 襲. How the 龍 didn't get changed to the Japanese 竜.
I was sleepy so I didn't double check. Thanks for the correction. I'll change that in my comment.
@@Ennocb There are technically as many standards as there are authorities wanting to standardize, but most traditional standards probably just have minor differences, especially when used for Mandarin. There was also an attempt to simplify Chinese a second time that didn’t work out.