meant to make a comment on chinese language reforms for my multilingual literatures class (to offer a parallel to the language reforms in norway that accelerated the linguistic divergence (and eventual literary estrangement) of norwegian-americans from their homeland. despite falling readership the major norwegian-language papers in america elected to retain the pre-reform language in the interest of keeping old subscribers rather than attracting readers from the new arrivals from norway. at same time, norway turned its attention to anglophone american literature and began to lose interest in the norwegian literature of its immigrants abroad, and so on.)

meant to, but find self reading about the simplification of chinese characters instead. had in fact talked a little to my mother about this some time ago, though that was less conversation than getting told off for my misconceptions about jianti and fanti. in anycase i am much less interested in the arguments for and against simplification or the socio-historical motivations and implications - than in the actual methods of simplification. dan donoghue likes to say (about language rules) that it wasn't as if the anglo-saxons appointed a committee to sit down and make up grammar. but this is exactly what happened in the chinese case. and since the first thing you learn in any introductory linguistics class is that all natural languages change, and if you accept there is nothing either good or bad about that, and that it happens even as we speak (for instance, we only have to look at old english and how "that operating platform became reformatted" (to use an e-ching expression) and how in modern english language certain of those changes continue with the same logic, maybe how in honey i shrunk the kids shrink shrank shrunk is becoming a present-praeterite verb!) then you can see the reforms in chinese writing a logical progression, and one that isn't necessarily following the path of least resistance, but arrived at by projecting and accelerating natural language changes through conflation, generalisation, shifts in connotation, changes through analogy, in short, the way language does change naturally. whether that is a good or bad thing is quite a different issue and i know all the arguments for and against.. but the linguistic aspect of it is extremely cool and if i could be involved in one project like this in my lifetime i shall die happy.