fántǐ (fán·tǐ complicated; complex; difficult · {body → [style] → [typeface; font]} → [traditional Chinese] 繁体 繁體) zì (characters 字) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”
For a long, long, long time, Chinese characters were just Chinese characters. Then, in the 1950s, the Communist government of mainland China issued what came to be known as the First Chinese Character Simplification Scheme (a second round of Chinese character simplification was later attempted and ultimately rescinded), and official simplified Chinese characters came into the world. (Some characters had been unofficially simplified and used for various purposes, both everyday and artistic, before that.)
To distinguish these newfangled official simplified Chinese characters from the Chinese characters that had existed before, and that continue to be used by many people in many parts of the world, retronyms were coined to refer to these pre-existing Chinese characters, just as the term “acoustic guitars” was coined to refer to regular non-electric guitars after electric guitars came along.
In the English-speaking world, the pre-official simplification characters have come to be called “traditional Chinese characters”, as opposed to the “simplified Chinese characters”. In the Chinese-speaking world, as is true of many things regarding Chinese characters, the situation is…complicated. Wikipedia summarizes the situation thusly:
Traditional Chinese characters (the standard characters) are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world. The government of Taiwan officially calls traditional Chinese characters standard characters or orthodox characters (traditional Chinese: 正體字; simplified Chinese: 正体字; pinyin: zhèngtǐzì; Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄓㄥˋ ㄊㄧˇ ㄗˋ).[source] However, the same term is used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard, simplified and traditional characters from variant and idiomatic characters.[source]
In contrast, users of traditional characters outside Taiwan, such as those in Hong Kong, Macau and overseas Chinese communities, and also users of simplified Chinese characters, call them complex characters (traditional Chinese: 繁體字; simplified Chinese: 繁体字; pinyin: fántǐzì; Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄈㄢˊ ㄊㄧˇ ㄗˋ). Users of simplified characters sometimes informally refer to them as “old characters” (Chinese: 老字; pinyin: lǎozì; Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄌㄠˇ ㄗˋ).
Users of traditional characters also sometimes call them “full Chinese characters” (traditional Chinese: 全體字; simplified Chinese: 全体字; pinyin: quántǐ zì; Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄑㄩㄢˊ ㄊㄧˇ ㄗˋ) to distinguish them from simplified Chinese characters.
In my experience in the Chinese fields in Canada, I have always heard traditional Chinese characters referred to using this week’s MEotW, “fántǐ (fán·tǐ complicated; complex; difficult · {body → [style] → [typeface; font]} → [traditional Chinese] 繁体 繁體) zì (characters 字)”. For reference, this is also the term used on jw.org when referring to Mandarin written using traditional Chinese characters:
jw.org refers to traditional Chinese characters as “fántǐ (fán·tǐ complicated; complex; difficult · {body → [style] → [typeface; font]} → [traditional Chinese] 繁体 繁體)” characters.
3 replies on “fántǐ zì”
It’s a common belief that all “simplified” characters were invented in the 1950s, but many of them already existed and were merely standardized in the 1950s. For example, the “simplified” character 从 (cóng, “follow”) has been shown to be older than its “traditional” equivalent 從 so perhaps in this case it would be more accurate to call 從 a “complexified” version of the earlier simple character 从. That’s why Wenlin software uses the terms “simple-form characters” and “full-form characters” instead of “simplified” and “traditional”, so as to avoid making any implication about which version came first. Wenlin’s manual compares this with the English spelling of “color” vs “colour” : the version without the U is actually older (going back to Latin), the U was added due to French influence (“couleur”), then American English dropped that and went back to the original Latin. People with too much national pride might like to think that the with-U version was the perfect original, which crude Americans messed up, but in some cases the American version is actually older. Similarly, the writers of what we now call Traditional Chinese script evidently felt that some characters didn’t have enough strokes to make a beautiful well-balanced appearance on their important documents and signs, so they added more strokes to make it look more artistic. Perhaps the “crude” simpler forms continued to be used by less “well-educated” people, so the new “anti-elitist” Communist government was only too pleased to incorporate those “lower-class” forms into its new standard. Many simplified characters really were invented in the 1950s, but others have a longer history.
Also, the writers of the 1950s standards felt that some characters were already good enough to use as-is, so there are many characters which are exactly the same in both Traditional and Simplified, such as 人 (rén) and 的 (de). So we don’t have to expect there to be a Traditional-Simplified difference on EVERY character. This situation can however lead to a printing problem on older computers. If you have ever printed out a Chinese document, and the printout looked like some characters were written with thick strokes but others had thinner strokes, then what happened was this: You were either trying to print Simplified Chinese using a font that was meant for Traditional only, or to print Traditional Chinese using a font that was meant for Simplified only. In the case of characters that are exactly the same in both scripts, the computer used the character from the font you selected. But for other characters it had to use a fallback font, and the style didn’t match. The solution is either to change the font to one that matches the script, or (better) use a font designed to print both scripts (I believe the latest versions of Windows, macOS, iOS and Android come with fonts that can handle both without changing the style).
Thank you for sharing such interesting additional information! Indeed, as with many things regarding Chinese characters, the matter of character simplification is quite complicated, ironically.
To be a little more accurate, I have added the word “official” to describe the set of simplified characters that was introduced by the Communist government of mainland China in the 1950s. As you pointed out, people had been unofficially simplifying characters for various purposes long before the mainland Chinese government came along and “officialized” a set of simplified characters.
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