Today in phrases I never thought I‘d read…
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Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern | 
Today in phrases I never thought I‘d read…
The political weaponization of simplified scripts since 1949 [between Taiwan and PR China means that...] Proponents and opponents of simplification continue to hurl jabs and insults at one another. The character for "love" in traditional form and in simplified form) is a favorite example. The simplified version replaces the component for "heart" with "friend" . What is love, the champions of traditional characters ask, with no heart?
It was the sorting, classifying, and indexing that fascinated him to no end. So much so that Du [Dingyou] wrote profuse odes to the temple that consecrated this bond, the modern library. He even created a special Chinese character for the book depot, or library (pronounced tuan). The character for "book," shu , is lovingly guarded by the enclosure wei.
... some began to wonder whether the writing system should continue to exist. Anarchist Wu Zhihui sounded one of the first alarm bells: "No amount of change can alter the fact that the Chinese script is bizarre-looking and weird in form; it assumes a thousand shapes and is nearly impossible to differentiate-all because it is fundamentally flawed. That is why we believe it is only a matter of time before it is abolished."
I'm not sure how clearly this comes out in my photo, but the characters on the cover include binary code in faint print... 🤩🤩
