A Preliminary Discussion on the Guidelines and Approaches for Assorting the Variant Forms of Chinese

To develop the  Table of Normalized Chinese Characters, we should further assort the variant forms of Chinese characters. During the process of assorting, besides the rule of “basing on the existing character tables”, these guidelines should also be followed: 1. The identification of variant forms shouldnt be too lax; 2. Modern Chinese should be our basis, but the needs in type setting and printing ancient books should be considered as well; 3. The historical consistency of Chinese should be maintained, the Chinese characters should be kept justifiable, so while the rules of “widely used and simple” should be satisfied, “historic correctness” should also be taken into consideration. Various approaches should be taken to assort the variant forms, including: 1. Abandoning the variant forms (in current language); 2. Differentiating characters usages into those in which the characters are variant forms of other characters, and those in which the characters are the standard forms; 3. Removing those that shouldnt be variant forms of other characters (but historically was included in a table of variant forms); 4. Making modifications on the existing table; 5. Appending variant forms that are widely used but not included in the existing table; and 6. Adding annotations for certain variant forms that need extra explanations.