Emmanuel Ternon

Traditional Chinese Characters: A Translingual Writing System Emmanuel Ternon

Chinese characters are a fascinating writing system. As humanity's last logographic script still in widespread use today, they constitute a precious part of the cultural heritage of the so-called Sinosphere, the region of the world made up of the various nations using Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese as their official languages. Chinese characters once served as part of the writing systems of these four languages, enabling a person literate in one language to read a large number of written words in the other three. However, Chinese characters have suffered a great deal of damage in recent history due to language reforms that either simplified these characters (in Chinese and Japanese) or removed them from the language's writing system altogether (in Korean and Vietnamese). These reforms have not only made East Asian people less capable of understanding their own languages but also severely reduced cross-cultural communication between the various nations of the Sinosphere. In this book, we examine how the damage caused by Chinese character simplification and elimination reforms can be reversed by re-adopting traditional (i.e. non-simplified) Chinese characters into the writing systems of all languages of the Sinosphere. Doing this would not only enable users of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese to better understand their own languages, but also have the potential to help East Asian people reconnect with their common cultural heritage.