Characters Which Underwent The Greatest Simplification...

[Hofmann]

what is the 'true' literacy rate now?

There isn't any way to find the true rate of anything in demographic statistics. You can only guess and say how sure you are. Furthermore, literacy is defined differently by different people. Therefore, comparisons across systems is unsound. This page says 93.3% some time between 1995 and 2005.

[atitarev]

what is the 'true' literacy rate now?

Where - in China, US or Comoros? According to Wikipedia it's 93.3% in China, do you have doubts?

[Ed Log]

what is the 'true' literacy rate now?

Still a lot of young people that I meet from the country have a very basic grasp of the written language. OK for SMS'ing but not reading the paper or writing anything

[chrix]

Why does Guo Morou mention Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit :unsure: :unsure:

It's a very confused analogy, because he should compare those Classical languages with Classical Chinese, not Chinese as a whole. One can argue how accessible Classical Chinese still is to Chinese people today, and if that's due to the characters or rather to the fact that they all study this in depth throughout high school and college. I mean I had five years of Latin in high school, and so you can say Latin is still accessible to me, but not to those who didn't study Latin, and the script doesn't really play any role...

[renzhe]

There isn't any way to find the true rate of anything in demographic statistics. You can only guess and say how sure you are. Furthermore, literacy is defined differently by different people. Therefore, comparisons across systems is unsound. This page says 93.3% some time between 1995 and 2005.

Furthermore, I've always wondered how they measure literacy in China (especially since the argument is often used together with the question of Chinese characters and/or simplification and/or phonetic writing).

For example, do they measure Uighurs who can read and write their own language as literate? Or Tibetans? Or does only Chinese count? China does have close to 10% non-Han population, many of whom do not speak a Chinese regionalect as their native language.

If other native languages are counted, then it makes the numbers irrelevant for estimating the (subjective or objective) value of Chinese characters and/or their simplified and traditional variants. If they are not counted, then it is hard to compare with other countries.

[chrix]

Actually I have also heard those glorious literacy rates reported for Japan (95%-99% or something like that) called into question, as they appear to have set the bar quite low for what counts as literate in Japan. Maybe someone has some references/links to back that up...

[Hofmann]

In The Chinese language: Fact and fantasy, John DeFrancis said:

Research by a German scholar into prewar Japanese literacy noted that the requirements for graduation after six years of schooling, which was all the education received by most Japanese, included the ability to read and write 1,360 kanji and to recognize another 1,020, a total of 2,380 in all. Tests on military recruits a few years after graduation disclosed that youths with public school education remembered how to write an average of only 500 or 600 characters and still recognized only 1,000 of the 2,380 they had once learned (Scharschmidt 1924:183-187).

...and they were all considered literate.

[xianhua]

but the winner (so far) is:

廠 → 厂 (chǎng)

A-hem... in terms of stroke reduction it's still the following - as far as I can see:

(15 : 2)I've found so far is 籲 to 吁. A mere drop from 32 to 6. Any advances on 26?

[atitarev]

A-hem... in terms of stroke reduction it's still the following - as far as I can see:

Yes, it depends how you measure - the number of strokes or proportion (Tr./Simp.).

BTW, 籲 is a variant of 龥 (26 strokes)

[anonymoose]

纔 (23) → 才 (3) Reduction: 20

齣 (21) → 出 (5) Reduction: 16

豐 (18) → 丰 (4) Reduction: 14

虧 (17) → 亏 (3) Reduction: 14

叢 (18) → 丛 (5) Reduction: 13

蔔 (14) → 卜 (2) Reduction: 12

醜 (16) → 丑 (4) Reduction: 12

弔 (4) 0→ 吊 (6) Reduction: -2

[Glenn]

弔 and 吊 are a trad/simp pair? I thought they had two different meanings...

[anonymoose]

弔 and 吊 are a trad/simp pair? I thought they had two different meanings...

They are according to nciku.

Anyway, lots of traditional characters were simplified to already existing characters, giving the same character more than one meaning. Off the top of my head, there's 後 and 后.

[Glenn]

Yeah, I've known about 後 and 后 for a while, but 弔 and 吊 strikes me as being really odd. I suppose that's just because I'm so familiar with the former, and this is the first I've heard of the latter. It's not like the meanings are any farther apart in one of the pairs (they're both pretty distant).

[Hofmann]

Huh? Does 吊 mean anything besides 弔?

[Glenn]

I learned them as (generally) 弔 -- "mourning" and 吊 -- "hang". It might be a false friends situation, or it might just be the kun-yomi of 吊 that means "hang".

[trien27]

弔 and 吊 are a trad/simp pair? I thought they had two different meanings...

According to my Cantonese dictionary, "吊" 同 "弔", therefore, they have the same meaning, more or less.

弔 -- "mourning"

From MDBG.com dictionary:

English definition = "a string of 100 cash (arch.) / to lament / to condole with"

According to my Cantonese dictionary, it's not just 弔 for "to condole with / to mourn" but "弔喪".

Since "吊" 同 "弔", "弔喪" = "吊喪" to mean "to condole with / to mourn".

So it doesn't have anything to do with Kunyomi at all.

弔 (4) 0→ 吊 (6) Reduction: -2

It can't possibly be a reduction, but rather an addition?! You can't reduce anything by a negative number [Try that with your fingers: can't?].

[Glenn]

I did confirm that it isn't just the kun-yomi that means "hang" for 吊, but a meaning like 弔 isn't in there ("there" being 漢字源). For 吊 it gives, as meanings, "hang" (in different Japanese varieties, although they all pretty much make it into English as "hang") and "a unit of currency equal to a thousand mon (sometimes a hundred mon)" more or less.

It does, however, in the 解字 section, say that it's a 俗字 that was created because 弔 was headed towards meaning 弔問. It glosses 弔 with another word for "hang," suggesting that the original meaning of 弔 was "hang" and since it tended towards a meaning dealing with death 吊 was created to take over that original meaning. Under the entry for 弔 in 漢字源 definitions 4 and 5 (the last two) state that it has the meanings of "hang" and that monetary unit listed above, and in that regard is the same as 吊, but the first three definitions all have to do with death, mourning, and condolences.

I just checked out 吊 at 百度, though, and saw that it has all those meanings, whereas they split off in Japanese, and that entering 弔 just converts over to 吊. Great. Yet another difference to get used to. As if my head hasn't been all confused lately anyway. I suppose this isn't all that dissimilar from the 機/机 situation, where in Japanese the first means "loom/machine/situation/opportunity/etc." and the second means "desk," but both mean the same thing in Chinese (this time a more obvious trad/simp pair).