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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)

#21

Post by hangonhn »

kobeya wrote: post #18
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.

Wait. Can you clarify that? Most of the world outside of East Asia has had that since there was a written language.

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

#22

Post by gfaure »

tankenmate wrote: post #16
x1798DE wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

> ソ comes from the Chinese character 會

ソ comes from 曾 ("once, at one point") not 會. Yes, those are different characters.

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

#23

Post by corey_moncure »

The depth and breadth of the diaspora around Chinese characters makes it extremely difficult to get these things right. Even this article presenting highly specific domain knowledge tees off with a questionable example:

`The Japanese cross the blade in 刃, the Koreans don’t`

Well Japanese have both 刀 for katana, the well known sword, and 刃 for yaiba / "blade". But in fact 刀 is used for many kinds of blade, by itself as `katana` and as a component of words like 太刀, 印刀, 日本刀, &c. (see http://kanji.quus.net/jyukugo1498/) Is this really pointing to a distinct concept from 刀 in Korean, as the article suggests?　　

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

#25

Post by ageofwant »

craftyguy wrote: post #20
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!

Installing the free hanazono fonts should sort you out

For arch:

    pacman -S ttf-hanazono

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

#26

Post by dastbe »

corey_moncure wrote: post #23

The depth and breadth of the diaspora around Chinese characters makes it extremely difficult to get these things right. Even this article presenting highly specific domain knowledge tees off with a questionable example: `The Japanese cross the blade in 刃, the Koreans don’t` Well Japanese have both 刀 for katana, the well known sword, and 刃 for yaiba / "blade". But in fact 刀 is used for many kinds of blade, by itself a…

then is а really a distinct concept from a?

regardless of whether 刀 and 刃 have similar meaning in korean and japanese (in chinese the former refers to the knife/sword itself whereas the latter refers the edge of the knife), the unification of them across multiple languages makes it difficult to handle variations, nuance, and (most importantly for a forward thinking standard) divergence over time. that korean, japanese, and chinese have similar characters for historical reasons doesn't mean they are bound to be the same character forever in their respective languages.

that another commenter below me can't easily transmit to me the character for "smelly" in japanese because whatever font i use is preferring the chinese character for it is a signal that the standard is broken.

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

#27

Post by yeukhon »

> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither.

Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings.

Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful.

已 vs 己

This puzzles many Chinese people...

Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time (stopped) 己 is self

So 自己 is me/self, while 已經 means already.

There is also 巳, which is ancient Chinese clock means 9-11am I believe.

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

#28

Post by emodendroket »

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…

My biggest frustration with Han unification is that on my phone Japanese text appears with Chinese variants and there's no way to correct this without rooting the phone or setting the system language to Japanese (both kind of a lot of work to get something working that should just work out of the box). People say "well, what's the big deal? You can read it anyway," but think about how you'd feel if English text randomly had Cyrillic or Greek equivalents mixed in with the Latin letters and see how you'd feel.

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

#29

Post by emodendroket »

corey_moncure wrote: post #23

The depth and breadth of the diaspora around Chinese characters makes it extremely difficult to get these things right. Even this article presenting highly specific domain knowledge tees off with a questionable example: `The Japanese cross the blade in 刃, the Koreans don’t` Well Japanese have both 刀 for katana, the well known sword, and 刃 for yaiba / "blade". But in fact 刀 is used for many kinds of blade, by itself a…

You've misunderstood. https://i.imgur.com/pTkbX7g.png

(for a bigger list see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la...)

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

#30

Post by emodendroket »

dastbe wrote: post #26
corey_moncure wrote: post #23

The depth and breadth of the diaspora around Chinese characters makes it extremely difficult to get these things right. Even this article presenting highly specific domain knowledge tees off with a questionable example: `The Japanese cross the blade in 刃, the Koreans don’t` Well Japanese have both 刀 for katana, the well known sword, and 刃 for yaiba / "blade". But in fact 刀 is used for many kinds of blade, by itself a…

then is а really a distinct concept from a? regardless of whether 刀 and 刃 have similar meaning in korean and japanese (in chinese the former refers to the knife/sword itself whereas the latter refers the edge of the knife), the unification of them across multiple languages makes it difficult to handle variations, nuance, and (most importantly for a forward thinking standard) divergence over time. that korean, japanes…

Those characters are not unified. What the article is actually saying is that when Koreans write 刃 they place the short stroke in a difference place than the Japanese do (and users of traditional Chinese place it in still another).
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