A Chinese education official said Thursday authorities would "seriously consider public will" in deciding on the revision of 44 Chinese characters after the move triggered widespread controversy.
Li Yuming, director of the Language and Words Information Administration Department of the Education Ministry, said authorities would "handle gingerly" and "would not work against the will of the people" in deciding whether to adjust the writing of the Chinese characters.
During the second half of August, after eight years of effort, the ministry unveiled a list of 8,300 standardized Chinese characters in common usage to solicit public opinion
The revision aims to regulate ways of writing characters.
Ministry officials and language experts said the controversial revisions concerned 44 characters in the Song type face used for print in publications, which were used in computers and printers.
The plan to change these characters sparked widespread debate as the public found they looked different from what they had been.
Many citizens, including language teachers, voiced objections to the ministry's decision on the grounds the changes would cause confusion.
The public also thinks the cost involved in the revisions would be huge as it could lead to numerous amendments to, among other print examples, books, dictionaries, signs, company names and ID cards.
By Aug. 31, people in all walks of life from both home and abroad, including teachers, university students, retired soldiers and government leaders had sent nearly 3,000 suggestions via e-mail, letters and faxes to the Education Ministry.
The majority of the correspondents objected to altering the Chinese characters, fearing that it causes inconvenience in writing habits, affect students' learning, and increase financial costs,.
"We will respect suggestions from all social sectors and seriously study them and take advice from the public. We will try to formulate a table of Chinese characters that both reflects public opinion and meets social demands," the ministry said.
Li, who is also the deputy director of the State Language Work Committee, said the authorities would carefully study every suggestion.
As an ideographic language, the Chinese written history is 3,400 years old -- one of the oldest in the world.
Today, there are two ways of writing Chinese characters: traditional Chinese characters usually containing many strokes are still in use in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan; and simplified Chinese characters that have been used on the Chinese mainland since the People's Republic of China was founded.
(Xinhua News Agency September 4, 2009)
