I guess this is my opportunity to duplicate a Facebook post I wrote to procrastinate on finishing my undergraduate thesis two years ago... but it’s always interested me how rigid our ideas of characters are in the age of ISO codes and typefaces... https://twitter.com/weiweiwrites/status/1344367626668052481

Like for example, if you handwrite 魚 super fast you will inevitably come out with something like 鱼 — which is of course how simplification began in the first place. In the days before characters had representative computer codes, when did 魚 end and 鱼 begin?

Of course, historians working with Chinese texts have to deal 異體字 all the time. But when I was doing research about 1980s Hong Kong, surrounded by an atmosphere which very much discriminated between two sharply divided writing systems, I was really surprised at times...

These two examples are from late 1980s HK, the first being a letter from an elderly woman and the second being a high school assignment. There are so many simplified characters, 異體字 and even new Kanji. Even the high school student, born and raised in HK!

You can find so many inconsistencies too even at the same times. Here’s the Singaporean rally protesting the killing of Lumumba, around 1961 (after the initial script reforms). They’re from the exact same event (I think), yet the first picture has 主義 while the second has 主义.

My grandfather, and old people in general (bless their hearts), will write whatever they learned, convention be damned. Now that he has transitioned to WeChat and handwriting input, this results in all of his messages being in his own idiosyncratic mix of character types.

It’s almost like a kind of electronic signature, which characters he “types” in the “traditional” way and which ones he does in the “simplified” way. At one point I wanted to create a new font package that would correspond to my grandfather’s relationship with characters...