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Unofficial simplified characters

Language Log 2025-10-18

It has often been mentioned on Language Log that the simplification of Chinese characters by the PRC government did not come at one fell swoop in 1965, but was spread out over a long period of time, and had at least one additional formal stage, in 1977, that was retracted in 1986.

This has resulted in uneven acquisition of separate sets of simplified characters by students who went through primary and secondary education at different times.

From Yizhi Geng:

I am writing to share an observation about Chinese characters that I find interesting. Are you aware of a term called Second Simplified Chinese Characters? It was published by the Chinese government in 1977 but was soon abandoned in 1986. I have observed that in my family, my grandmother (born in 1940) still uses these characters, while my grandfather (born in 1935) even uses traditional Chinese! My grandfather was born into a landlord family in Anhui Province and studied traditional Chinese characters as well as English at a private school run by his father. My grandmother came from a worker’s family in Changchun City without any primary educational background and learned all the characters during her work. I found that many of my family members, including my parents’ younger sisters (born in 1967 and 1975), and I (born in 1998), are not able to read Second Simplified Characters. Even many of my friends born between the 1980s and 2000s have never heard of them. However, my grandparents can communicate using Second Simplified Characters and Traditional Characters without any difficulty! They write notes on the door, refrigerator, and shoe cabinet like this:

d197540ad14c7f110df03547b1d96ab0.jpg
According to the currently standard set of simplified characters (since 1986), that sentence would be read thus:
 
chūmén guān hǎo shuǐ, diàn, méiqì
出门关好水，电，煤气。
"Turn off the water, electricity and gas when you go out."
 
where 煤 in 煤气 ("gas") is written as 

The note from Yizhi pictured above does not have the instance of the doubly simplified word for "shoebox" that he is talking about here:

“鞋盒 written as “X合” (shoe box).

But I know what he's talking about, and I know people who are old enough to write the character for "shoe" (xié) this way.
 
 U+301BB, 𰆻
CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-301BB
  ← [U+301BA]CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G → [U+301BC]
 
Instead of the gé 革 ("leather") semantophore / radical — makes sense for "shoes", right?), this unofficial simplified graph from the Second (1977) set replaces it with 又 which is neither semantophore nor phonophore.  It is there simply to fill in space to make up the square tetragraph.  See "Grids galore" in the bibliography below.
 
That same 又 is brought into play in the "official" simplified sinograph for "chicken", viz., jī 鸡 (official trad. 雞, var. 鷄, which has an "avian" radical on the right — with all those blizzards of strokes and shifting of semantophores and phonophores — you can see why the script reformers of the 50s and 60s had to do something radical (!) with this very common character.  See my many posts on Chinese restaurant shorthand and related topics, plus the scores of embedded links to which they lead.  Here's an extreme simplification for "chicken" that I document:  jǐ  几 ("a few; several; how many"), jī 几 ("small / low table") — for a spectacular sign featuring it, see "General Tso's chikin" (6/11/13).
 
Yizhi continues:
 
For our young generation, these characters appear to be impossible to read or guess, especially when too many of them appear in a short sentence! This reminds me of your discussion about the evolution of language and characters with the change of historical background in class. I feel that this is the most practical example of this phenomenon I've encountered.

Formal and informal simplification of sinographs will never stop until they reach the stage of a syllabary or an alphabet.  This is the natural development of all living, functional logographic / morphosyllabographic scripts (e.g., nǚshū 女書 ["women's script"], kana, hangul, chữ Nôm, etc.).  Mixed scripts like Chinese and Japanese, which include both phonetic and morphosyllabic / logographic components do exist, but even they are witnessing the encroachment of phoneticization.

 

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