Information Technology and Chinese Characters

Already in ancient China, philologists started compiling the lists that comprised thousands of characters. The task of creating such lists for various purposes is still relevant in the epoch of information technology and high literacy rates. New words are regularly appearing in the Chinese language, both neologisms and loanwords. The authorities and the Chinese society as a whole show a growing interest in traditional culture and the classical texts of various periods. In modern publications, there are more and more elements from Ancient Chinese and its successor, the Classical written language Wenyan. Due to all these processes, the number of different characters in the present day texts is constantly increasing. New graphs are not created, however, they use those characters, which usually represented in the past or still represent this or that monosyllabic word or a morpheme in disyllabic and polysyllabic words. On the one hand, any characters can be entered on computers with the help of the official Romanized Hanyu Pinyin alphabet or even with the help of the voice input. Modern Chinese, especially the younger generation, not very often write texts by hand. As a result, there is a concern in the Chinese society that the same information technology, and in particular artificial intelligence, will eventually decrease the literacy level even of the educated generation. On the other hand, in the wave of the revival of traditional culture, Chinese intellectuals proposed to return those original variants of characters that were abolished in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s and the 1960s.