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Concept
Simplified Chinese characters
Summary
Simplified Chinese characters are one type of standard Chinese character sets. Along with traditional Chinese characters, they are one of the two standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the People's Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s to encourage literacy. They are officially used in the People's Republic of China, Malaysia and Singapore, while traditional Chinese characters remain in common use in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Japan, as well as South Korea to a certain extent.
Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name or colloquially . In its broadest sense, the latter term refers to all characters that have undergone simplifications of character "structure" or "body", some of which have existed for millennia mainly in handwriting alongside traditional characters. On the other hand, the official name refers to the modern systematically simplified character set, which includes not only structural simplification but also substantial reduction in the total number of standardized Chinese characters.
Simplified character forms were created by reducing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of Chinese characters. Some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms. Some characters were simplified by applying regular rules, for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simplified version of the component. Variant characters with the same pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character, usually the simplest amongst all variants in form. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification and are thus identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies.
A second round of simplifications was promulgated in 1977, but was later retracted in 1986 for a variety of reasons, largely due to the confusion caused and the unpopularity of the second-round simplifications.
Official source
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