Re: Nice comment, Adam! (was: beautiful scripts)

From: "D Tse"

Adam wrote:

> >Oh, and I too am a traditional character fan.  I do NOT like to look at
the
> >mangled Mao-ies.  They are so asthetically UNpleasing.  The traditional
> >characters (with a few jarring exceptions) have a lovely sence of balance
> >born of generations of refinement.  The "simplified" characters all look
> >like their about to fall over or colapse inward or break in half.
They'er
> >UGLY!
> Hear, HEAR! I am not very good at recognising simplified characters, and I
> dislike them greatly.  Some of them even look quite un-Chinese to me...
In Taiwan, my Chinese partner would frequently have me read letters from
mainland relatives aloud to him since even context clues weren't enough for
him to decipher a string of simplifieds sometimes.

If you've been nursed on the traditional, it's a *rough* aesthetic road
going to simplified. Living on the mainland for four years, I got used to
them, but I found them heavy and clunky, kind of a metaphor for the whole
stifling Communist experience, or perhaps footbinding. Then, one day per
chance, I was in a bookstore in Chongqing and found a book that had been
imported from Hong Kong, in traditional! It really was like seeing old
friends again, my eyes glided down the page, oh joy, oh rapture.

Unfortunately, most of the books I have here are in simplified, as books in
China could be bought for a song and a prayer. It feels weird to read the
classics, "Tales of the Water Margin", "Dream of the Red Chamber", "The
Journey West" et al in simplified ("Das Kapital" and "Mao's Little Red Book"
pose less of a dilemma). And there's decent modern lit out there, too, so
one just has to hunker down and read.

Revenge is sweet, though. Expat colleagues in mainland China who had studied
simplified in the States loved to berate the kvetching of us
traditionalists. Now that they're back Stateside, they've found it's a much
harder uphill climb going from simplified to traditional (say, to read local
papers in Chinese) than vice versa. Har de har har...

Kou

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