Welcome to the seminar on "The Affairs of the Week". I am Jaime Fong, a professor from the Chinese University and also guest host for today's seminar on "Simplified or Traditional?" Today, I would to share with you a piece of interesting news. In recent days, rumor has it that the UN is proposing to abolish traditional Chinese characters and deny its pride of place as a formal writing system. This arouses a fierce debate over Traditional and Simplified Chinese in the Chinese community around the world.
First of all, let me show you something. This is a Chinese rickshaw, something like a car of the affluent in ancient China. Next, let's look at an ancient Chinese character, 車, which means `car' in English. Can you picture the uniqueness of the Chinese Language? Unlike most languages like English and French, the Chinese language is a form of hieroglyph. Hieroglyph is a simplified picture or symbol used to represent an object in writing. In fact, Chinese characters are developed from our ancient hieroglyph. Take the character 車 as an example. This is the hieroglyph for it. Does it look similar to the real-life rickshaw? After many years of development, the character now looks like this. We can still see the image of rickshaw with a little imagination.
Now, let's look at the last character. This is also the character 車, but where have the wheels of this rickshaw gone? This is a Traditional Chinese character, whereas this other one is a simplified Chinese character. They are standard contemporary Chinese characters in print. Simplified characters are the characters officially simplified by the government of the People's Republic of China, and they do so in a bid to promote literacy among the farmers in rural areas in the 1950s. .
As a great fan of traditional Chinese culture, I am definitely against the abolition of Traditional Chinese characters. From the character 車, you can see that its simplified Chinese characters go against the principle of the original Chinese hieroglyph.
