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Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

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Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#11

Post by yuhong »

ramshorns wrote: post #10

The reason the second Japanese character is censored out of the title seems to be that having a character outside the BMP in the title broke everything horribly, not because of actual censorship of swearing or something. I wonder how long it will be until UTF-8 is used everywhere and non-BMP characters enjoy first-class support and testing. You'd think the U+1Fxxx emoji would have been enough to make this happen.

It will still probably take time. It was only recently that MySQL allowed more than 768 byte indexes for example, before which utf8 was commonly used instead of utf8mb4.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#12

Post by kunimu »

tjallingt wrote: post #8
cperciva wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us who don't read Japanese, can you explain what the four characters in question mean?

Not a Japanese reader so i can't fill you in on what exactly the characters mean but they are characters from the Japanese katakana script. Katakana are generally used for loanwords and each character represents a sound: ツ - tsu シ - shi ソ - so ン - n The reason these are difficult to learn is because the tiny differences in stroke angles (especially when handwritten) make it easy to confuse them.

On their own they don't mean anything, however the first four may appear and indeed do as multiple words on their own, or as part of other words. Japanese has many homophones.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#14

Post by jasonjei »

Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. Even among the traditional and simplified variants, there are different forms for the same character based on popularity.

For example, 吃 and 喫 have the same modern meaning "to eat," but one is more commonly used. A character like 鎌 has a variant like 鐮, just as well as 塚 and 冢. People choose characters based on stylistic reasonings (and in Taiwan, many choose the Japanese variant to be "hip").

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#15

Post by glandium »

Not even going into the "fun" of the Han unification, there are some weird things in Chinese/Japanese characters.

For example, 右 (right) and 左 (left). You'd think the top-left part is the same, but it's not. In the case of 左, you write the horizontal stroke first, but in the case of 右, it's the second stroke. They also have a slightly different shape.

Another example from the Jōyō kanjis, 臭 (stinking, odor) and 嗅 (smell). You'd think the second is just 口 (mouth) added to the first, but it's not. Etymologically, 臭 is 自(nose, simplified form of 鼻)+犬(dog), but was simplified in the Jōyō list, and became 自+大. 嗅 was not part of the list back then. Which doesn't mean it didn't exist. It just means it was not recognized as regular enough by the ministry of education. 嗅 was only recently added to the list (2010), but was not simplified to remove the extra stroke, so it's 口+自+犬, leading to this funny inconsistency.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#16

Post by tankenmate »

x1798DE wrote: post #7
cperciva wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us who don't read Japanese, can you explain what the four characters in question mean?

They are phonetic characters, so they don't mean anything. シ (shi), ツ (tsu), ノ (no), ソ (so) and ン (n), all in katakana (used to write loan words and slang).

Actually Katakana derived from Kanji, but were typically only used for their sound rather than their meaning and a very very simplified version of how you would write the character quickly allowing for lifting the brush (Hiragana is the simplified version quickly without lifting the brush) roughly speaking; so you are mostly right but not completely.

シ comes from the Chinese character 之, meaning either "of" or "this"

ツ comes from the Chinese character 州 (although some researchers disagree), meaning "state" or "province"

ソ comes from the Chinese character 會, meaning "meet", "party", or "interview"

ン comes from the Chinese character 尓 (again not clear), meaning "you" or "that"

This divergence happened because Chinese characters were used to write Japanese which is mostly from a different language family. Some Chinese characters were used by some for their meaning (ideogram) and used by others for the sound they made to approximate the sounds used in Japanese. Obviously Chinese influenced the Japanese language (for example numbers in Japanese sound similar to numbers in middle ages colloquial Hokkien). Over the last 1,000 years or so there have been numerous occasions for changes, standardisation and simplification. So even to those who study these changes over time it can sometimes be unclear.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#17

Post by tekacs »

I was stunned to find that no article has ever been submitted to HN with 'Han unification' in the title[0].

(there are comments [1] on the topic if you're interested to see HN's discussion on the topic as I was)

[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Han%20unification&sort=byPopul...

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Han%20unification&sort=byPopul...

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#18

Post by kobeya »

jasonjei wrote: post #14

Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. Even among the traditional and simplified variants, there are different forms for the same character based on popularity. For example, 吃 and 喫 have the same modern meaning "to eat," but one is more commonly used. A character like 鎌 has a variant like 鐮, just as well as 塚 and 冢. People choose characters based on stylistic reasonings (and in Taiwa…

Historically alphabet based phonetic descriptive written languages are a recent invention.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#19

Post by dastbe »

glandium wrote: post #15

Not even going into the "fun" of the Han unification, there are some weird things in Chinese/Japanese characters. For example, 右 (right) and 左 (left). You'd think the top-left part is the same, but it's not. In the case of 左, you write the horizontal stroke first, but in the case of 右, it's the second stroke. They also have a slightly different shape. Another example from the Jōyō kanjis, 臭 (stinking, odor) and 嗅 (sm…

not sure if you're coming from a purely japanese background, but in chinese 左 and 右 both have the same stroke order for the upper left portion.

and to show just how ridiculous han unification is, on my laptop your example makes no sense because the 臭 has a 犬!

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#20

Post by craftyguy »

g09980 wrote: post #2

A favorite of Japanese study beginners is learning how to distinguish between ツ and シ, as well as between ソ and ン.

In my browser, those are just 4 identical empty squares. I guess I'm a beginner since I can't distinguish between them!
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