Culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. In elementary school, we learned that 文化是血統,語言,宗教,和生活習慣的綜合体. Here language plays an important part. Why are there so many dialects in China? Because there are many mountains & rivers that tend to isolate people from contacting each other. When time goes by, each region develops its own language. Language also shapes the way you think, you behave & forges a set of values in daily life. Minority people in China usually live in a remote or isolate area. When time goes by, it develops its own language. Say it in a reverse way, if you want to separate people, let them speak different kind of languages & soon they will drift apart. Babel towers in ancient Babylon is an excellent example.Whenever I visit Taiwan, I hang around book stores & end up buying a lot of books. When I visit mainland China, I also go to bookstores. The BookCity in Shanghai (福州路), seven-story building, filled with thousands of books. I spent a lot of time inside but I didn't buy anything. I try to explain my behavior. I found that I didn't have any incentive or interest to buy them. The main reason is that the printed words look so alien to me & sometime they look even worse than Japanese. Either 白字連連 or 錯字連篇. The culprit is the simplified characters. If I have to read the translated "Pride & Prejudice" in simplified characters, I rather read it in English directly. 文章帶感情, 文字亦然. There are two camps when it comes to writing, Traditional & Simplified. The former is called 简体字, the latter has several names: 正体字, 原体字, 傳統字, 繁体字 etc. I have no idea why some people go along with 繁体字. It is derogatory, misleading & bad. How could it be so complicate for several hundred years & people don’t feel it. I think the English translation says it better, Traditional or 傳統字. Our ancestors used traditional writing for so long & also used brush pen (毛筆). They didn't have any complains. They simply grew with it. Nowadays we don't use brush pens & we write without any problems in schools. As a matter of fact, with the help of computer technology, the input of Chinese characters is via keyboard (most kids do) & bypass the handwriting. The side effect of this is that we are having a new generation of people that can only read but can not write. In other words, people can't write without a computer. It is scary if you can't count or calculate without a calculator.
In fact, 傳統字 already has a set of characters simplified & should be adopted & included in 簡体字. The current 簡体字 is way over the reasonable limit. It is a bad idea to get rid of 同音字. We already have a lot of confusion in speech. We should use the writing to reduce it instead of aggravating it. For example, most people seem to agree in keeping 後 & 遊.
If Chinese people have the wisdom, they should sit down & really think hard for the issue of the character writing. This is important & it will have enormous influence to the future generations. Both camps should recognize the pros & cons of 簡体字 & 傳統字. Just sit down & iron out a compromise version of writing, called it 進化字. Without it, we will see Chinese people drift apart when time goes by. In fact, it already causes a lot of confusion outside China as to which is the right way to teach our kids Mandarin.
