2012
On February 8, 2012, a press conference was held to open up the database. While Ma had said there are no political intentions, he did defend the use of traditional Chinese characters.[1] He said Simplified Chinese characters are too streamlined, and there is no logic, so they require pure memorization.[6] For example, the characters for Han (漢), the surname Deng (鄧) and the word for theatre (戲) have no relation to each other, however the simplified forms (汉, 邓, 戏) make it appear as if they are related.[6] There were also questions from educational panels that this project may violate the "language neutrality act" (語言平等法) since Taiwan has many languages including aboriginal languages.[7]
Taiwan released a version at chinese-linguipedia.org,[8] and mainland China released their own version at zhonghuayuwen.org.[9][10][11]
