Thread by @ZevHandel

What looking at the second-round simplifications character by character doesn't reveal are the systemic effects they would have had on the script. This character is a great example.

The first-round simplification changed 讓 into 让. That's a savings of 24-5=19 strokes. 1/

https://twitter.com/jianhuazi_bot2/status/1419479663915765761

There's no doubt that writing five strokes takes less time than writing 24. So that's worth something, I suppose.

But ... there are losses too. The simplified character isn't any easier to recognize, indeed it is probably more confusable with other characters, adding a very 2/

slight cognitive burden for the reader. (It's of no practical consequence, but worth mentioning.) The new phonetic element 上 isn't obviously a better match for the pronunciation than was 襄, so there's no improvement there for character learning. 3/

But worst of all, the simplification does not obviate the need for the script user to learn and use the 17-stroke component 襄, because it occurs in many other characters in the script that were not simplified: 壤, 嚷, and 釀, among many others. Although none of 4/

the characters having 襄 as phonetic component are anywhere near as frequent as 讓 in Modern Standard Written Chinese, the three I listed aren't exactly rare or obscure either. 5/

If the user of the simplified script has to learn 襄 anyway, and its sound value is reinforced through its occurrence in a half dozen other characters that are actively used in the script, how much value was there in the simplification of 讓 to 让? An argument can be made 6/

that the script as a whole wasn't simplified at all as a result of this individual character simplification.

But ...
7/

the second-round simplifications, which were never adopted, would have changed *all* occurrences of component 襄 into component 上, as this one illustrates.

8/

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1419528966772203523?s=20

As a result, the component 襄 disappears from the script entirely, reducing that number of phonetic components in use overall, and thus making a systemic reduction in how many character components a script user needs to recognize and remember how to write.
9/

The second-round simplifications strike us as very weird-looking. But they are much more logical than the first-round, which actually increased inconsistency in the structure of the script and increased the number of character components that had to be memorized. 10/

It seems to me that there is a more compelling case to make that the second-round simplifications would have constituted a genuine simplification of the script *as a system*. I don't think the first round achieved that. The result was a "simplified", not simplified, script. /end

Correction: While 嚷 and 壤 were not changed in the first-round simplification, 釀 was changed to 酿. In fact, that's shown right in the tweet that I started off by quoting. All four of these characters (嚷, 壤, 讓/让, 釀/酿) end up with 上 on the right in the second round.

Thanks for this question, @zdok , which prompted some follow-up thoughts in thread below ...

https://twitter.com/zdok/status/1419534713874702336?s=20