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207 9. The Chimera of Reform We have seen in the first several chapters of this book that users of Chinese characters everywhere have sought by one means or another to transform this cumbersome writing system into a serviceable artifact. In China, these efforts led to radical “simplification” of character shapes, elimination of some forms through phonetic borrowing, and creation of an alphabetic notation that is taking some heat off the characters by acting as a de facto orthography in places where the latter are completely unsuitable. Japan introduced its own simplified forms and attempted to limit the number of characters in daily use. In Korea, reformers also experimented with limitation schemes or replaced Chinese characters outright with their own phonetic writing. The best that can be said for a century of writing reform in China, Korea, and Japan is that the character orthographies were tidied up somewhat. Only in Korea, which reached outside the character system and its shortcomings, was a fundamental breakthrough achieved. There is a reason why reform of Chinese character–based writing has produced and will continue to produce unsatisfactory results. Whereas alphabetic systems derive their complexity largely from facts speakers already know about their languages, the complexity needed to drive character -based writing is contained within the system itself. For alphabetically written languages, knowing the language means knowing a good part of the writing mechanism. Unfortunately, this is not true of character-based systems. Lacking well-motivated connections with sound, the characters must depend on their own intrinsic structure to differentiate meaning, which cannot be appreciably reduced (“reformed”) if enough redundancy is to remain in the system for it to work. As a result, every effort to reduce complexity in one sphere merely transfers the complexity to another, giving the appearance of progress but in fact only shifting the problem around between different aspects of the system. This phenomenon—the cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul—is most apparent in reforms that target character shapes, but is also manifested through a series of paradoxes that frustrate efforts to lower their numbers. 208 Forces for Change Even in Japanese and Korean, where character use is limited, their availability in principle prevents the emergence of viable alternatives by obviating the need for a change in the underlying language and the way it is used. History shows that using a limited number of Chinese characters invariably leads to the use of more, leading in turn to new demands for another reduction in an endless cycle that goes nowhere. Ultimately, East Asians must choose between the morphemic, character-based systems, more or less as presently constituted, and systems founded more solidly on phonetic principles. The Five Paradoxes of Character Limitation The two most obvious drawbacks to Chinese character-based writing and those most commonly targeted by reforms are the large number of individual tokens and the complexity of their shapes. While conceptually distinct, the two categories tend to merge when analyzed. For example, one can reduce the number of characters in use by dropping the form of one and assigning its meaning and sound to another character. This action can be regarded as a change in form, especially if the two morphemes are etymologically related. Conversely, simplifying individual forms entails the progressive loss of distinctions between members of the set, the limiting case being merger of different forms into the same character, which reduces their total number. Although I will deal with these two problems separately, one should not lose sight of their interrelatedness. Character limitation programs in China, Japan, and Korea have taken the form of prescriptive lists meant to apply to society as a whole, introduced through public agencies and the compulsory education system. Although the lists are generally called “guidelines,” reformers through their governments are usually able, in the beginning, to enforce some degree of compliance from the public media and even among private publishers. Particular mechanisms vary. In some cases, society is encouraged to use only characters that appear on an officially sanctioned “common use” list. Other lists prescribe which of two or more competing forms of the “same” character should be treated as standard and which should be abolished. Still others identify replacements for existing characters, contrived through a variety of techniques to be discussed below. Selection is typically done on the basis of frequency; just like the letters of an alphabet, some characters appear more often than others, providing one handy measure for deciding their relative importance. More sophisticated lists take other...

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