A history examination on Chinese character
First of all, China is with many languages, or dialects as we call it today. Very naturally the people on this vast land needs to communicate between different region and people. 2200 years ago, the first emperor destroyed at least 6 languages, the written form , not the oral language/dialects , to make this job easier for everyone, thus you have the traditional chinese now.
second, the written form has many types through the chinese history, simplified, localised or per calligraphy. Thus every dynasty still spent a lot of efforts to keep the standard chinese characters circulated and used. So a new dictionary created in every prominent dynasty and some even carve the classic literature and dictionary to stone tablet in Han dynasty and Tang dynasty.
Third, the simplified Chinese is by the influence of western culture. It was told Chinese is with no efficiency , need to be replaced by alphabet characters. We can see the trend very clearly, the south east asia, Turkey , Mongolia etc.. also we have the pioneer of Japanese , korean and Vietnamese, where used Chinese for thousand years and changed to another written language. The KMT also made its effort to change the traditional chinese in Taiwan, but failed.
4th, the simplified chinese , 90% of the simplified characters or new characters is not new actually, they are from the many forms in the chinese history, especially from Xing calligraphy(行书) and Cao calligraphy( 草书).
Language overwhelmingly serves many purposes, as a vehicle for people to communicate, secondly, a priceless asset to nation or ethnic race. If the argument is about the asset part of language, the first emperor is the biggest evil , he destroyed at least six languages and he also changed the ancient chinese character from logogram to a much simplified form that never looks like a picture anymore. With all these, what do you think of the first emperor’s revolution on Chinese language?
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