ABSTRACT
A note from Ken Goodman: In Chapter 4, the focus was on attempts by scholars and committees to simplify Chinese characters. In this chapter, the focus is on the natural process of change in characters and their use. It was important in the history of China as a nation that the writing system was standardized across the breadth of China. But over time the system had to adjust to the needs of its users. Because the writing system represents meaning, its users have always been tolerant of variations in reading and writing the characters, since the context disambiguates the unconventional use. The pull toward convention and the power of invention that characterizes all language learning and use is demonstrated in the phenomena of unconventional characters in Chinese. Junlin Pan suggests that my term “miscue” is a good fit for these invented characters in Chinese.
