Panel proposes guidelines to halt misuse of honorific Japanese
Thursday, February 3, 2005 at 08:07 JST
TOKYO — A government panel on the Japanese language proposed Wednesday setting up the nation’s first guidelines on the use of the honorific and polite form of speech [“keigo“] to counter its widespread misuse….The panel also calls for revaluating Chinese characters designated for common use, known as “joyo kanji,” to reflect current use of Chinese characters on computers.
The current joyo kanji table, which specifies 1,945 common Chinese characters, has not been updated since 1981. The panel notes that the table did not foresee the widespread use of computers.
The panel also suggested the need for conducting research on the public’s ability to write and read Chinese characters, and how frequently certain ones are used for the names of people and places.
An Agency for Cultural Affairs official said it is necessary to study some characters that are often used but not included in the table. (Kyodo News)
And their point is…? With computers, people are increasingly unable to write characters by hand.
They had several points. Handwriting issues were not mentioned, as far as I can see. I am impressed by this site. But I think there are many cliches in the overall setup. We all use cliches, of course. I have lived in Taiwan in the late 1980s. There are no internationally useful alternatives to Pinyin, as far as I know. But romanization was an issue in the campaign against so-called Rightists in China in 1957. To ask whether Chinese characters could be abolished or not is the wrong question, especially if one says yes and points at Vietnam. Yes, they largely got rid of the characters. But there have to be people who are able to read old texts. Some people are trying to bring Mon characters back into use. And it was a 500-year long process. Nobody abolished anything, not in the way that romanization was discussed in China. The most radical plans that were discussed in the late 1950s seem to have led to mass starvation, to the Cultural Revolution etc. etc. Pinyin on Taiwan and in China and in international use, those are all interesting issues. But the messianic tone- I know what is right and this is the page to tell the world- of the home page makes me uncomfortablle