An Orthographic Appendix

 
 
 
 
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.

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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.