KanjiVG – SVGs of Kanji character strokes including order, shape and direction

1) Chinese characters are traditionally/historically written with a brush, not a modern pen or pencil. Because brushes don't create uniform lines, there is a connection between the specific series of movements and the final appearance of the character (sort of like calligraphy pens). Basically, inconsistent movements tend to produce inconsistent-looking characters, so an agreed-upon standard aids in legibility.

2) Various components (most notably the "radicals") reoccur across many characters. Having a (mostly) consistent set of rules for how each component is written and in which order aids memorization because you're not learning every new character "from scratch".

3) Stroke order affects how mechanically efficient it is to write the character, which can be a pretty big deal when some of the more complex characters are upwards of a dozen strokes.

But as for the second question: for HTML documents, many tags have a lang attribute that decide which version of the glyph to render within that tag. Hacker News has lang="en", so it'll use a user setting to decide. For example, in Firefox' about:config, there's a setting called cjk_pref_fallback_order. If e.g. ja comes first, the little square inside the top square in 骨 is rendered on the right side, if any zh thing comes first, it's rendered on the left side.

For example, think about writing a capital A. It’ll look different if you draw the middle bar first or if you draw the outer two lines first. F will also look different depending on whether you draw the vertical line or one of the horizontal lines first. Try a Q with the little bottom dash before drawing the circle. It’s not only weird but more difficult.

The difference in these characters is subtle, but you can notice it with your own writing. Now instead of 3 strokes to write a character, imagine those with 15 or even 28 strokes. The odd balance and proportions have cascading effects.

I have serious doubts whether this kind of data is even copyrightable, as long as you're not redistributing it verbatim.

A specific selection of words with pitch data (e.g. the NKH pitch dictionary) might be copyrightable as there was creative expression involved in picking which exact words to put into the dictionary and in what order. But the data itself? A 猫 is always going to have a HLL pitch accent (in the standard accent). That's a fact. And facts itself are not copyrightable.

You can't copyright a phone book[1]. Quoting from the case:

> "Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another's publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement"

Sounds exactly like the pitch accent data dump that's been floating around which a lot of people use. (Not the verbatim NHK one; the other one.) They probably used the data from NHK's pitch dictionary to compile it along with a few other dictionaries. But does it feature the same selection and arrangement? Nope.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications%2C_Inc.%2C_....

So sometimes modern Japanese is actually similar to simplified Chinese, sometimes it is similar to traditional Chinese, and sometimes it is unique. There is no simple 'fork'.

For instance, 円 (yen) is simplified Japanese and uniquely Japanese. It used to be same as traditional Chinese 圓. In Chinese it was separately simplified twice to its current form 元. So when you see prices in 円 in Japan and 元 in China it's actually the same original character simplified differently.

Interestingly, traditional Chinese 國 was simplified by reusing an old character and is now 国 both in Japanese and simplified Chinese but not in traditional Chinese.

Why not.