As a syllabic and ideographic writing, the Chinese written history is 3,400 years old -- one of the oldest languages in the world.
Today, there is two ways of writing Chinese characters: traditional Chinese characters that usually contain many strokes are still in use in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan; and simplified Chinese characters that are used on the Chinese mainland since the People's Republic of China was founded.
"The readjustment is made against the backdrop of the information age and for the sake of facilitating information storage, management and exchange," said Li Yuming, deputy director of the State Language Work Committee.
"Slight amendments will not affect the lives of ordinary people, and it will do good to the standardization of the printing," he said.
Experts revised the characters while taking into consideration the calligraphy of traditional Chinese, such as those still in use in Taiwan, said Prof. Wang Ning, of the Beijing Normal University.
"Minute changes would not affect people's habits of reading. The 44 characters account for no more than six per thousand of the total in the list, so it would not force the public to learn all the Chinese characters again," said Wang, also one of the experts who attended the revision work.
"Whether to make a readjustment for a character does not depend on the votes, but on whether it is reasonable to do so," she said.
"Of course, we are not against the public. We are listening to the public sincerely," she added.
From Xinhua
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