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

namakajiri.net

111–120 of 153 posts

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

#111
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

Yeah, but they are side by side here, and not in handwriting.. If you're not careful in handwriting it'd be real hard to tell the difference.

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

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

or just any blade as "ha": https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/刃物

I meant specifically the word with both characters.

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

#113
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My exact same feeling. Even if the Han Character, as in the Han unification are the same, the glyph matters a lot in context. It a little like replacing every french word / character à with just a. And à is only accessible with variant fonts which is not supported by most OS, and if you have your system locale as French every English word would have à instead of a.

Is this because developers have their locale set to their language, so it looks good for them, and they're forgetting to define the language of the text? That's the case for HTML: But I don't know about other instances.

Does that work in Android? I've never seen anything look right really. And for apps I don't think it's even an option.

Either way it's annoying to set people up to screw up in this way. And the unification also means it's quite difficult to get multiple variants into the same text.

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

#114
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

So interestingly, for 左 and 右, the etymological stroke order is the japanese one. It was "simplified" in mainland China and Taiwan.

Do you have a source for your claim? Particularly, you're suggesting that the stroke order for the top left part was once different in China. I'd really like to see a document on this.

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

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW many of the unified characters under Han unification are considered "wrong" specifically in Japan (in other CJK countries folks seem to be more lax). From what I understand the feeling is as if you started writing `s` as `ſ` in English. I'm not very sure of this but it seems like the Japanese characters mostly stayed the same after branching off of Hanzi usage at various points many centuries ago (more than a mi…

To the extent this is true I'd say it's because Korean people only occasionally use Chinese characters and the default is almost always to display Chinese variants, and not because Japanese people are uniquely particular.

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

#116
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…

Maybe they should just romanize (switch to Latin script) the way Vietnam did.

One thing I've noticed whilst trying to learn Japanese is that reading long stretches of romaji/kana is just tedious. There's certainly overhead to learning kanji (especially as a non-native speaker), but I'm not sure romanisation alone would make for a better language.

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

#117
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…

> How can you NOT see the difference?

I saw the difference, because it reminded me of the difference between ン and ソ in katakana, but if you aren't Chinese I can see how you could assume they are the same. You can draw the same character differently in English without changing the meaning (e.g. 9 straight or curved, 7 with or without a bar through it, looped k or f), so overlooking the difference between 𠮟 and 叱 seems easy enough.

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

#118
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Who did you hear that from? The Japanese writing system is the Chinese one, minus all of the internal consistency, plus lots of characters the Chinese aren't traditional enough to keep in the language. It often uses the same character to write distinct Chinese loanwords which differ wildly in pronunciation based on when and from whom the…

If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. Also Japanese dictionaries could be easier to check, since you just need to know the pronunciation. Your conception on the writing systems is quite weird, consistency (if any) is the same, I would say. I do not get what you mean by characters being "traditional" or not. Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random…

> If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible.

Bit of a stretch IMO - the pronunciation and usage can still often be different enough to trip you up, especially when you consider there are non-English loanwords on occasion (e.g. playing Persona 5, it took me far too long to realise that ルブラン, which I naively transliterated as ruburan, was actually the French "Le Blanc").

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean this? http://www.geocities.jp/yokomoko3/kihon-5.jpg In japanese, there is not, but there is this difference in how the second and third strokes interact.

Yeah. To be clear; this is what I've guessed from seeing it written in various ways; I don't have an authoritative source. (In general there doesn't seem to be a good source for what kinds of variations in a character are accepted and what the "kernel" of the character is.)

There is, unfortunately, a great lack on this very topic. In the digital age, it's sad that for those things, you pretty much have to rely on books.

There are a few resources, like glyphwiki or Kanji-VG, that have stroke information, but TTBOMK, they don't contain any information about the kinds of strokes.

Even if they did, that would barely scratch the surface of what I am, personally, interested in. For instance, I'm taking Japanese calligraphy classes, and am interested in the various ways characters can be written in the different styles (楷書, 行書, 草書).

I've also found that interesting etymological facts about kanjis help me remember how they're written. To give a couple examples of things I've found by looking at japanese kanji dictionaries, 並 (line up) is derived from 立 (stand up) repeated twice (立立), and 自 (self) had the meaning of nose before the character for nose was created (鼻), which is why you'll find it in many nose-related characters like 臭 (smell) or 息 (breath). The latter is the kind of thing that I've found most learning apps completely miss. All those I tried, which are all essentially based on the same data sets anyways, will tell you that the radical 自 is for self, and be done with it. Somehow they do manage to tell you the radical 月 can be related to flesh (which is why it appears in many organ-related characters). In the worst case, Kanji-VG based apps will even tell you that characters with the radical 自 contain the radical 目, because you know, 自 looks like 目 with a stroke on top. Which is completely misleading.

Essentially, what I've found works for me is to go to the local library, open good old fashion japanese-japanese dictionaries, and research the subject. It helps that I live in Japan.

I did try a few japanese-targetted apps, but they are mostly drill based, and/or heavily targetted at kids. That doesn't work for me. Maybe I simply haven't found the good ones... finding something on those app stores is so impossible.

As for japanese learning tools for foreigners, they tend to be targetted at beginners, which is fine, when you're a beginner.

On the subject of drills, I haven't found any that actually tries to challenge on similar-looking, possibly even homophone characters. At best, they will make you pick between homonyms, like "given $context, do you write きんし 禁止 or 近視?" (both are correct writings for きんし, but have totally different meanings, so the context tells you which to use), but I haven't found any that makes you pick between homonyms that are purposefully wrong but very close looking. Like "do you write そくおん 促音 or 捉音?" (only one of those actually exists, the other would actually have the same reading if it did exist, but it doesn't).

But I digress.

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

#120
post #92
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…

also 戊戌戍

And their friend 戉.
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