The notion that pre-modern Chinese primarily used ‘traditional’
ideographs has
no factual basis.
Many of the so-called ‘simplified’ ideographs are in fact traditional forms.
They were stylistic variants used in informal registers. Not
infrequently, the simplified variant was the only attested form of an ideograph
in the informal genres.
Fast forward to present-day Mandarin, it has proven futile to imagine that a
single character set could prevail in any given population. Even within
established ‘simplified’ regions, ‘traditional’ character sets are freely used
in everyday communications as an aesthetic or political choice. With the
arrival of personal computing, the ability to decode is all it requires to
be able to encode with ease.
Today, the task of the lexicographer is simply to document which style each
variant of an ideograph came from.
***
In the table that follows, k’ai forms are those commonly used during the
Chin–T’ang period; ts’ao, hsing and print forms are annotated with the
period in which they are first attested. Use
git blame
to see the sources for such attestation.
Only forms that are still current in everyday usage tend to be included.
If all current variants of an ideograph already existed in k’ai, no other
styles are exemplified. If a variant existed in ts’ao, it is not further
exemplified from hsing. Being the cursive of k’ai, hsing is in general
later than ts’ao, which was originally the cursive of li.
The etymology of an ideograph is only touched on insofar as such knowledge
motivated the use of an archaising glyph in k’ai. Usage statement of
dictionaries is cited as secondary evidence.
Bibliography
Theory
Barr, James, The Variable Spellings of the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 1989), 186–211.
Finglass, P. J., 'Orthographica Sophoclea', Philologus, 153 (2009), 206–28.
黃征, '漫談古籍整理的規範問題', 敦煌研究, 162 (2017), 70–7.
黃征 (ed.), 敦煌俗字典 (2nd edn, Shanghai, 2020), 2–40.
劉元春, '楷化篆字概說', in 隋唐石刻與唐代字樣 (Canton, 2010), 225–40.