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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)

#41

Post by emodendroket »

corey_moncure wrote: post #39
emodendroket wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've misunderstood. https://i.imgur.com/pTkbX7g.png (for a bigger list see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la... )

If that's what the author is referring to, there are less ambiguous ways to express it. Even so: in my experience in Japan I've seen e.g. 認 hand-written both ways, and specifically remember becoming curious about this variant. My conclusion after consulting with native speakers and university professors I knew there was that they are essentially and functionally equivalent. That is, against the author's point, Japane…

So on one side we have reference materials and on the other we have your anecdote. Even if we accepted its validity, this is just one example of many.

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

#42

Post by microcolonel »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35
yeukhon wrote: post #27

> 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…

I can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱

I think yeukhon means that if you get lazy and write 已 or 己 with a single stroke (easy to do with a ball-point pen), they are basically indistinguishable.

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

#43

Post by emodendroket »

tanilama wrote: post #33
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…

刀 simply means knife/sword, or knife in general, while 刃 means the sharpest part of the knife. In fact, 刀刃 is its own word in Chinese, in this case meaning the blade of a knife.

Never seen it before, but in Japanese that's apparently "tohjin," meaning the blade of a sword. http://www.weblio.jp/content/%E5%88%80%E5%88%83

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

#44

Post by dastbe »

emodendroket wrote: post #30
dastbe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

rereading my words i realize i was ambiguous; i didnt mean to say that 刀 and 刃 were unified (how would i have written them?) but that unifying those characters across multiple languages is ignoring that they have nuanced meaning based on what language they're in.

then add in your point that the written forms themselve are diverging over time.

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

#45

Post by mc32 »

dastbe wrote: post #19
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!

Also, radicals and roots can adjust shape to accommodate the partner, so they can vary in exact shape from one character context to another.

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

#46

Post by IgorPartola »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35
yeukhon wrote: post #27

> 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…

I can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱

The question is if you would recognize the difference if they weren’t side by side.

I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Hiragana as far as I can tell makes no internal sense. The characters for yo and ya don’t incorporate elements from o or a. And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going.

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

#47

Post by escherplex »

ageofwant wrote: post #25
craftyguy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interesting. Installed hanazono font HanaMinPlus.ttf in Firefox as J-default and even in this comment section the distinction between katakana 'n' and 'so' is quite clear whereas using MS Gothic it's somewhat ambiguous. Even more so when the two fonts are juxtaposed in LibreOffice.

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

#48

Post by mjevans »

Is the 'unspecified' rendering supposed to be the same as the 'popular' rendering (on the right); or is it supposed to be the one in the middle?

For me seemingly every example's left most and right most column (for the sets of 3) looked identical, while the middle form was different.

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

#49

Post by emodendroket »

dastbe wrote: post #44
emodendroket wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

rereading my words i realize i was ambiguous; i didnt mean to say that 刀 and 刃 were unified (how would i have written them?) but that unifying those characters across multiple languages is ignoring that they have nuanced meaning based on what language they're in. then add in your point that the written forms themselve are diverging over time.

To the extent they're exactly the same I don't think it matters. We don't need a separate English and Spanish j because they're pronounced differently. But 刃 in particular isn't the same across languages. The GP seemed to be confused, interpreting the article to mean that Koreans used 刀 instead of 刃 when what the article actually meant is that there are variants of the latter character.

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

#50

Post by smallnamespace »

IgorPartola wrote: post #46
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱

The question is if you would recognize the difference if they weren’t side by side. I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Hiragana as far as I can tell makes no internal sense. The characters for yo and ya don’t incorporate elements from o or a. And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition…

They don't make internal sense because they're originally derived from Kanji/Hanzi and more or less arbitrary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History

As a Chinese speaker learning the kana, I found knowing the etymology of the kana somewhat useful as a learning tool, but obviously this is of no help if you don't already know Chinese.

Also, Mandarin (and other Northern Chinese) pronunciations have changed quite a bit more than southern dialects, so knowing Cantonese is more helpful than Mandarin, e.g.

か 'ka' comes from 加, which is 'jia' in Mandarin but 'ga' in Cantonese

A syllabary that 'makes sense' would be Korean Hangul, where the relationships between the various parts of the mouth were purposefully encoded into the relationships between the components of glyphs.

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