So, I enjoy both Traditional and Simplified Characters for different reasons. The traditional characters are beautiful and are a link the China's cultural heritage. But they are a pain to write and only a bit less painful to read. The simplified set, where they are actually different from the traditional, are nice because they are easier to write but sometimes lose some radical information, making them more difficult to read in that situation. Simplified characters weren't really done with any systematic thought it mind.
I was just thinking about a potential system like this: Take the radicals, and the other "basic" characters (from Traditional) and actually simplify them systematically and consistently. And then work to start building the ~1200 syllables with the typical methods: meaning+meaning characters, and sounds like+means like characters, until you have the ~1200 characters. These characters would be, of course, the radicals, the "basic" ones like 天 and 火, and then the other "basic" derived characters--it isn't important what these mean (they have meaning, of course, like characters do) we just want to build the phonetic set. At that point, we can build all the other characters we need by combing one of the new characters with another in either a meaning+meaning character or a sounds like+means like character. I wish I had a way of illustrating this easily. One way would be to imagine a character, say 十. This character is simple enough, and of course it's pronounced shi2 and means "ten". In the reform, nothing would need to be done with this one. But we could then use it in a sounds like+means like compound like 十+日 (I can't put these together) to be basically 時. (e.g, sounds like "shi2" means something about day (or time). This system would be immanently more learnable because the sounds and meanings line up. No more wondering how a character sounds, and an easier, more consistent guess at what the character means. And easier to write because the characters have been carefully and consistently simplified, and because we've tried to not overly obscure the new simplified radicals and "basic" characters it isn't hard to read. We could also work to strike a balance in the forms for the sake of beauty, as well.
The only big downside I see, besides the difficulty and cost of implementation, is that Chinese speakers and people would lose an immediate connection to their heritage in past documents. But, considering the difficulty in learning these "old" characters, it's basically an academic discipline to read these anyway.
What do you think? Thoughts, comments, and criticism (and your own ideas!) are welcome.
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