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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)

#91

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.

I just filed https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/issues/104 after editing the HN title and discovering problems.

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

#92

Post by drwu »

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…

also 戊戌戍

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

#93

Post by azernik »

jack1243star wrote: post #87
azernik wrote: 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…

I'm talking about the Chinese loanwords; I agree, the English and generally European loanwords are written phonetically and are pronounced consistently.

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

#94

Post by jack1243star »

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…

What? How is choosing a character variant "hip"? I know in some case Taiwanese people are influenced by the default Microsoft font MingLiU, which has some Japanese variants.

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

#95

Post by Manishearth »

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…

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 millenium ago, actually), whereas in China these characters evolved.

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

#96

Post by Manishearth »

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…

While reading that I also got confused between 犬 (which I haven't encountered before) and 太 (which I have). Though that's just my lack of vocabulary. Still, it's pretty hard to tell these apart as a learner since it's not always clear which parts of a glyph are the important features.

My favorite one of these "look the same but aren't" pairs is 土 & 士 which differ only by the relative lengths of the upper and lower stroke. There's also 囗 and 口, which differ slightly in size but more importantly in the hooking of the second stroke; except half the fonts don't display that; and certainly not at the small font size I keep English text at (which is why I've tweaked the font-size for Chinese in my browser). It would be even more confusing when they get used as radicals except 囗 is always used to surround a glyph, whereas 口 is used squished up the "regular" way as in your example.

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

#97

Post by Manishearth »

greggman wrote: post #80

I'm often surprised these kinds of issues aren't fixed quicker. There are so many issues in browsers related to non Roman based letters (assuming that's the correct term for it) on the one hand I get that most browser (and OS?) dev happens in the West by people unaffected by these issues. One the other hand with > 1 billion people using non Roman based languages I'd expect this kind of stuff to be more of a priority.…

"non Latin text" would be the correct way to put it.

This script is called "Latin".

> on the one hand I get that most browser (and OS?) dev happens in the West by people unaffected by these issues.

As far as I can tell, this isn't in the browsers' hands. It's a font/unicode issue. Unicode has to encode these variants; and fonts have to support them.

That said, I am seeing that red table work in Firefox but not in Chrome; however this might just be because Firefox is my primary browser; and I've done a bunch of fiddling with font settings for any language I speak or am learning, and Chinese is one of them. The default OSX fonts may not be so good for that.

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

#98

Post by Manishearth »

HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #64
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…

> Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. If I could be very pedantic for a moment... Mandarin can be written in many alphabets. Almost every single native speaker one earth uses an alphabet to input chinese characters on computers and phones. And almost every native speaker learns their language using an alphabet - at least initially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_pinyin https:…

To get even more pedantic: I wouldn't say Cangjie or Dayi inputs are an "alphabet", and a sizeable number of users use those. They're certainly a way of inputting characters; and a method of looking at how glyphs can be broken down (one by stroke order, one by shape), but for it to be an alphabet there must be a rough phoneme mapping AFAICT; which there isn't.

(but yes, the majority seems to use phonetic/alphabetic input methods, i.e. pinyin or zhuyin.)

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

#99

Post by Asooka »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #73
wildmusings wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s hard to do in Japanese due to all the homonyms. Kanji gives meaning where romanizations would not.

Spoken language doesn't have kanji and people can communicate just fine.

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

#100

Post by glandium »

Manishearth wrote: post #96
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…

While reading that I also got confused between 犬 (which I haven't encountered before) and 太 (which I have). Though that's just my lack of vocabulary. Still, it's pretty hard to tell these apart as a learner since it's not always clear which parts of a glyph are the important features. My favorite one of these "look the same but aren't" pairs is 土 & 士 which differ only by the relative lengths of the upper and lower st…

In the category "differ only by the relative lengths of the upper and lower stroke", there's also 未 and 末.

I'm not sure what you mean about the hooking of the second stroke of 囗 and 口. Do you mean the fact that in the former, the angle tends to be 90° while in the latter it tends to be I don't know about Chinese, but in Japanese, the former is not a character on its own (at least, it's not in the 2136 Jōyō kanjis, neither is it in the ~6000 characters of the top level of the Kanji Kentei).

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