Hacker News Reader

Comment by chairmanwow | Hacker News Reader

Interesting choice to use the traditional characters over simplified.

He explains why on his site: ( http://taichi.graphics/misc/ ) and in another comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327362 )

Then why “太極” instead of “太极”?

    “太極” is a word from not only traditional Chinese, but also modern Japanese. Considering the fact that a significant part of Taichi (10+ papers and the general software framework) was done during my internship at The University of Tokyo hosted by Prof. Seiichi Koshizuka and Prof. Toshiya Hachisuka, I thereby chose this word in the intersection of two languages in memory of my time at UTokyo.

Thank you for pointing this out. While I dug, I clearly didn't dig deep enough.

I think the question of whether this is interesting is based on assuming the author is Chinese. This assumption isn't unwarranted, given information on the About page.[0] For example, he participated in the China National Olympiad in Informatics and he's attending Tsinghua University, in Beijing. Given how sensitive cultural assumptions can be, I'd like to make clear that I'm very clear that this is pure speculation based on circumstantial evidence and more than happy to learn more about this and be corrected as needed.

[0]: http://taichi.graphics/about/

From my reading, traditional characters are still in use in China (distinguished for the purposes of this discussion from Taiwan).

Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China primarily in handwriting and also used for inscriptions and religious text. They are often retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters...

In trademarks and business signs, TC is common.

https://www.quora.com/How-do-people-in-mainland-China-feel-w...

An application name is not all that different from a business name or a logo. Given this, choosing to use traditional Chinese characters (in this case 太極 in contrast to the simplified 太极) is consistent and not necessarily unusual. Of course, this is all speculation without hearing from the author.

How is it interesting? What are the connotations there?

My understanding is historically simplified writing systems are met with a lot of resistance when there is a small educated class interested in holding on to their status since they are intended to help bring literacy to the masses. A sort of parallel can be drawn with the Luther Bible. This was a threat to an intellectual class (the clergy) who's status was in part due to their knowledge of Latin. A similar thing also happened with Hangul in Korea. Taiwan still uses traditional characters. Beyond these facts, I'm not sure of the particular connotations the grandparent is referring to.

Simplified Chinese isn't really any easier to read than Traditional (actually, learning Chinese I find Traditional characters a tad bit easier¹). It's just easier to write by hand. With computers and IMEs I would say there's not much difference in ease of reading or writing.

1. There seem to be more phono-semantic compound characters.

Probably because it is done in Japan, which uses a modified version of traditional Chinese characters for writing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com