Thank you for the video. I am Chinese speaker, and it’s often sight that the writing is politicised (simplified vs traditional), and a lot of people changes how they think of you or react to you when you use either one of them, even used as name-calling labels. It is very nice to learn that the conflict is manufactured and I hope more people can learn about this and move on to meaningful conversation.

我在研究所的統計學教授，出生於美國，母語是廣東話，她會抱怨我（母語是英語的美國人）比她認識更多的漢字。 這可能是因為我花了太多時間研究《辭海》字典，並研究《道德經》。 就是在那本兩卷本的字典裡，我學到了很多異體字，其中一些異體字出現在不同版本的《道》中。 謝謝你的演講，讓我想起了大約 35 年前我的工作。--郭愛德

This video relates a lot to a project I did of creating an in-the-middle alternative character set to Simplified and Traditional Chinese, "改革字 Reformed Chinese characters", which combines the best of both sets and includes many historical variants e.g. 餐→湌 (recorded in Eastern Han's 說文解字 Shuowen Jiezi)、農/农 → 莀 (recorded in Song dynasty's 古文四聲韻 Guwen Sisheng Yun)、鱗/鳞 → 魿 (recorded in Song dynasty's 集韻 Jiyun)

Exploring different variants of a character sounds really interesting

Excellent! One consequence (an important one, I think) of understanding the way "variants" were deployed and why "standard" forms were not necessarily standard is that one immediately sees a fatal flaw in efforts to rationalize ideographically the forms of all the characters we lazily think of "standard."

Very interesting, I wonder what makes a character a variant and not an entirely separate character, sometimes variants take upon a distinct identity over time like 做 and 作, or that it's treated as separate in one area like 憑 and 凭 in japan, but treated as variants in another area like china. Do you know any websites I can use to easily look up variant relationships from the ganluzishu? Nice video by the way.

Thanks! Finally someone who is capable and willing to give some explanation of history contexts of this topic. All I would hear or read so far in the past 40 years was a simple: "and here is a simplified variant we use today." Japanese has the same problem. I have another question, coming from Japanese: there is the phenomenon that similar characters also share similar pronunciations, and the clue is when some graphemes match phonemes. I recently bought a decicated dictionary about that for Japanese. I was not that much into Chinese, but I have a small old soft cover booklet about Chinese homophone comparison which might be from the 1950s. Would You have a chance to make a video about this topic? I am aware that the same character has very many different readings across China, which also have changed over time, and depending on how and when they came to Japan from South or North China, the Japanese also have different "ON" readings for the same. But I only know that as a matter of fact. I wonder if You have some deeper insight into this, how Chinese writing influenced its neighbor countries over the centuries.

In calligraphy context, 高 with the ladder form is closer to bronze script or seal script e.g.from繹山碑(& 亯 from大盂鼎 which is also a building) that might be why it was seen as standard. Also in clerical script, the ladder and mouth would be practically the same both written with two horizontal and two vertical strokes. Great video btw 🪜

Variant forms for characters can commonly be seen in handwritten documents and film posters from the 20th century in Korea. There was a divergence between the standard forms used in printed text and the variants found in the handwriting of the last generations of Koreans who regularly wrote Chinese characters. However, younger Koreans, to the extent that they have learnt Chinese characters, only know the standard forms and aren't familiar with most variants at all. I don't know how the traditional Korean variants compare to those used in other regions of the Sinosphere. I'm guessing there are both commonalities and differences.

Interesting, indeed. Thank you very much for the sharing.

Fantastic video. I'll admit I didn't come into this expecting much, but this is really good overview of the subject. As a side note, variant characters are particularly frequent inHong Kong. The most prominent in my mind is 廣塲, which shows its phonetic relationship with 傷 much better.

Could you share your experience learning running and cursive script, and the resources that you find useful? Many thanks.

Very interesting! I didn't know that the character 髙 was used in China as well. Here in Japan we often use non standard characters and many variants, and sometimes there are characters like 佛 that are more common than the standard 仏.

The cardinal sin of simplifed Chinese isn't that it's a "variant", but rather they deliberately used a single character to represent two previously unrelated ones. 干, for a very prominent example, is used in place of 幹 and 乾, two very different words. That makes the simplifed Chinese process not just using a less common/complicated variant, but actively destroying a portion of the character set, even commonly used ones.

干禄字書で「通」とされている字の一部は日本漢字が引き継いでいますね。軽、継、属、塩、様、隠、従、争、叙 etc...

Wow, such a good content. I admire it's insightfulness and broadness of knowledge you have.

I think it's more of the result of cumulated "mistakes". It's not like nowadays in which long distance communication is pretty easy and standards can get well spread, and whenever two places got disconnected (which is like most of the time in the history) there is a chance for variants to spawn because people write things slightly differently (or very differently if some simplification become popular), and the difference will likely stay when the two places got reconnected. And for how easy it is such thing could happen, there's a good example in recent time. For a total of maybe less than 50 years of disconnection, there's some variation in the writing between Taiwan and mainland China, and that's even when only comparing the Traditional Chinese characters. They look very similar but is somewhat different. When counting simplified words both sides also don't simplify in the exact same way.

The Chinese scripts are ideogram - the larger the corpus depelops, the wider the lexical compilation becomes.

Cood video. I appreciate that it goes into great depth.

I know this is a terrible simplification, but it almost feels as if we had a dictionary of all typos and shorthands anyone has ever used in English. It is a little bit reflective of the way spoken language shifts over time, when you are reading for meaning and have the support of context especially in copied documents, there is tolerance for change in spelling. I don't know enough to analyse it deeply, but I'd guess changed elements could be either an extra or missing stroke, a shorthand, a similar pronunciation clue or a similiar meaning or a shift between meaning and sound, or even a reflection of a new or local pronunciation cue. Just like speech, it really is hard to keep anything standardised. We can be grateful as English speakers we're still pretty able to read things which are 500 years old, and with only a little effort some middle english as well going back a bit further. Old English is like another language though.

I wonder if japanese has the same thing. I know about Ryakuji as an unofficial simplified, but it could be cool to learn for shorthand writing.

As a japanese learner....thank u!

I guess that it follows the Pareto curve where 20 percent of the characters are used 80 percent of the time .

Glad I didn’t learn Chinese beyond basics at the middle school

Can I have 08:10 dictionary name

With this video I learned I should discriminate simplyfied characters for being ugly even though I already knew that some of them are actually older than the traditional characters, but still traditonal just looks better and has more information to keep the character in mind

Chinese pictoglyphs were invented by Black Egyptian Kemet who migrated from the west and introduced Afrikan scientific methods to asia

The chinese script. The single biggest impediment to Mandarin ever becoming a global lingua franca.