By Foong Woei Wan

Imagine if tomorrow, the Government announced that henceforth, it would make casual SMS and Internet spellings the standard form of English.

Newspapers, novels, textbooks and even identity cards would be printed in the new officially sanctioned, truncated script, and Singapore would be known as 'Sg' - much shorter and sweeter, no? If you insisted on using the old spellings, you would be called names like 'elitist'.

Now, imagine too, the furore there would be, although there would also be a certain satisfaction in some quarters that life has been made simpler for generations of schoolchildren.

This, more or less, is what happened in the 1950s to the Chinese script.

The Chinese government's simplification of Chinese characters in the name of improving literacy was so radical that five decades on, the simplified-or-traditional debate rages still. In August, the administration ruffled more feathers with a proposal to modify 44 more words.

While the new script is the standard in the mainland, the old script is the norm in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In effect, it is one China, two writing systems.

Among overseas Chinese, those in Singapore have learnt the simplified script since the 1970s, while those in the United States have turned schools into battlefields over which script should be taught.

In March, Tianjin representative Pan Qinglin proposed at the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference that the mainland should abolish simplified characters and bring back traditional ones.

Firstly, the simplification in the 1950s was too crude, he argued, and words lost poetry and meaning. The character for ai (love) had the component for xin (heart) cut out, for example, and is now heartless.

Secondly, in the information age, typing is no more cumbersome in the traditional script than in the simplified one. Thirdly, the return to traditional characters would be conducive to reunification with Taiwan.

Among vocal Chinese netizens, some saw Mr Pan's proposal as a step in the right direction but others felt it was a step backwards. Why not go all the way back to jiaguwen, the pictographs found on oracle bones, was the usual retort.

But Beijing's proposal to modify 44 characters - by chopping the upward stroke at the base of words such as cha (tea), for instance - was also vigorously opposed. In the media and on the Internet, the proposed exercise was dismissively dubbed 'plastic surgery'.

My sentiments exactly. Chinese characters are still recovering from the 1950s round of surgery. Do they have to go under the knife again?

Now, I am no purist. I do understand that language evolves and words change.

But there are good and bad changes, natural and unnatural changes. Some make sense with regard to both the function and form of Chinese characters, and others don't.

The Chinese script was standardised in the Qin Dynasty (221-207BC) by China's first emperor, Ying Zheng. To distinguish homonyms from one another, words were given sound and meaning components. The characters grew more complex, acquiring more strokes but also clearer meanings.

Through the centuries, they have evolved with usage among not only calligraphers but also commoners. Just as it is speedier to write 'you' as 'u' in English, it is faster to drag a stroke downwards than to write all seven strokes of the radical for yan (speech), for example, when you are dashing off a note in Chinese. Fair enough.

The trouble with the simplification in the 1950s is that all sorts of informal reductions seem to have been introduced willy-nilly into the standard script.

The modern English equivalent of the Chinese exercise might be changing 'you' to 'u' in the Oxford dictionary to be consistent with what is on the Internet. But surprise, surprise, 'you' is still spelt Y-O-U in standard English.

Out of the simplified Chinese characters, I can live with how in ma (horse), for instance, the four short strokes that stand for the legs have been reduced to one galloping long line. Probably an adaptation from calligraphy, the result does not look too different from the traditional word and resembles a steed in motion, more or less.

More questionably, other characters have had meaning components lopped off without rhyme or reason.

Not only has 'love' lost its heart, qin (relative) has also lost its jian (meet) component, suggesting families who don't get together. Consider how mian (flour) has lost its mai (wheat) radical, and is now indistinguishable from mian (face). Also, the words for fa (issue) and fa (hair) are now identical.

Are such simplifications a great leap forward for the Chinese script, really? Sometimes, it looks more like a regression to the pre-Qin period of too many homonyms.

Chinese commentators such as Sheng Dalin have used stronger language than mine: 'There are many problems with simplified Chinese characters, such as too much emphasis on the convenience of writing, and thus the loss of culture. This is tantamount to a castration of Chinese characters.'

Things could have been worse though. After the first round of simplification in the 1950s, there was a second round in the 1970s, when the character for wu (dance) was replaced by wu (noon), for example.

But Beijing thought better of it and backtracked after half a year. Even so, I have seen banners for 'noon' classes in my HDB neighbourhood.

The rules of Chinese writing have been crippled by arbitrary simplifications. How do you shut out rubbish such as wu (dance/noon) when you have opened the door to garbage such as mian (flour/face)? I say bring back standards. Bring back traditional Chinese characters.

In June, Taiwanese leader Ma Ying-jeou put forward a middle-ground proposal for China and Taiwan: People should be able to read traditional characters and could continue to write simplified ones.

It makes sense to me. By all means, feel free to go on writing simplified characters, just as you would go on spelling English badly in your SMSes and on Twitter. But a dismembered Chinese script should not take pride of place in Chinese culture.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.