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Thread: Which is better? Simplified Chinese Character or Traditional Chinese?

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[quote=GUESTMAX J,359325]While some simplified characters were adopted from conventional abbreviated forms that have existed for a long time, the vast majority of the changes made by PRC were "unnatural" such as the removal of the symbol for heart (心) from the word love (愛) into the new character (爱) without 'heart'. To many, the new 'heartless' love character is totally against with Confucianism which emphasises filial piety and humanity.[6] 
Pro-Traditional commentators claim that the so-called "changes" through the history is merely alteration in writing styles, not in the structure of the characters, especially after the Qin standardization. They also claim many other simplified characters were arbitrarily designed by the government of the PRC to pervert traditional Chinese culture for political reasons in order to carry out what the PRC viewed as modernization. Despite the fact that character simplification began in 1956 and had origins going back to the early 20th century before the founding of the PRC, and that character simplification was not a part of the Old Fours nor the Cultural Revolution (both starting in the mid 1960s), they claim character simplification, "Anti-Four Olds" and the Cultural Revolution were all treacherous acts of destruction of traditional Chinese culture. As a result of such "unnatural" evolution, many characteristics underlying various Chinese characters, including radicals, etymologies and phonetics were ignored and destroyed in their simplified form. One frequently-cited example of this argument is found in the character for "sage" or "holy", 圣 in simplified and 聖 in traditional. The simplified character removed the king radical (王), replacing it with soil (土). Opponents of simplification claim that the PRC government was politically motivated to simplify this character, to devalue religions and China's imperial past ("The kings and holy men are still just soil now").[citation needed] Supporters of simplification note that 圣 (literally meaning holy) is an ancient component used in characters like 怪(literally meaning crazy), and that 圣 was used as a variant of 聖 before the Chinese Communist government even existed.[6] 
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