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Comment by skypather | Hacker News Reader

Minor typos in the article: In using the word "Horse" to show Chinese character evolution, the "Regular" is marked from 220 AD to 907 AD. As a matter of fact, that kind of characters were almost the "standard" in Chinese before Chinese government simplified many words around 1950. Even now, the Republic of China (a.k.a. Taiwan) still recognizes the "Regular" characters as the standard. Among Chinese people in the world, it it also known as the "Traditional" characters.

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It’s funny because even in Chinese there’s widespread disharmony with respect to “complicated” (繁體字/繁体字) or “regular” (正體字/正体字) script, as opposed to “simplified” script (簡體字/简体字). (Left-hand side phrase is in traditional/complicated script, while right-hand side is in simplified, for comparison).

Even many of the “regular” characters have been simplified. Consider 吃 and 喫—they both mean to eat, but the one with fewer strokes became really the only modern choice to use (however, Japanese still uses the old variant). Another common one is a simplification of the first symbol for Taiwan (臺灣). 台 is often in used of place of 臺.

Where can I read more about this topic?

Off the top of my head, the only place I can recall the 喫 character appearing is in the word 喫茶店 (coffee / tea shop). To eat Japanese would use the 食べる or　召し上がる. After referring to a dictionary, there is a word 喫する，but it's not common (as in I don't recall ever hearing or learning this word) and means more generally consume by mouth as in drink / eat / smoke. Yes, the Chinese 喫 means eat, but no the meaning is not exactly the same and not used with the frequency of the word eat 食べる or　召し上がる.

Conversely, 食 also means "eat" in Chinese, but is now used almost exclusively in nouns like 食物 (food) or 食堂 (dining hall). The Chinese character inventory is simply too large to keep all possible uses, especially across different languages.

Yep!

食 is still being used everyday in Cantonese as a verb. Granted there are some who classifies Cantonese as a different language from Mandarin, as there are many differences between the two such as this example.

Right—I was only writing about the character form. 食べる is used to mean to eat, but as far as raw characters are concerned, Japanese doesn’t use 吃 but rather 喫, the non-simplified form.

Apparently there is a use for 吃 in Japanese, 吃 is a sound used to represent a tile being discarded in a game, in compounds such as 吃驚, to be surprised. I think this compound is also used in Mandarin with the same meaning. Quick check of my Chinese dictionary indicates yes, they are a shared character compound / meaning.

Edit: fixing up my Japanese

Japanese does use it, but it's rare: 吃（ども）る to stutter

Tangentially related question: do Chinese website use higher font size (especially for traditional script) ? I find those character hardly readable on hackernews at default font size.

Yes for the most part, just check out weibo.com baidu.com xinhuanet.com for example, but its still possible to read at hn size, just not that comfortable.

"longform" chars, like 臺 are typically used in formal writing, like official government docs [marriage lics, passports, etc]. There are also the counterfeit resistant "banker's" number chars used in official docs too [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals]

I think "regular" was used as an example of a script style.

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