Well, I vote for Han unification of #Unicode, and I rather think that more Chinese characters should have been unified (e.g., 高 & 髙, 產 & 産, 內 & 内).
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee But why wouldn't Greek and Coptic share the same alpha? Why wouldn't Hebrew and Arabic share the same aleph? Why wouldn't Hiragana and Dewanagari share the same ka?
And while we're at it, why aren't all the decimal systems with slightly differently named but clearly related numbers in Unicode properly unified?
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@hongminhee And why don't we unify 猫 with :blobcat3c: while we're at it?
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley It's a logical leap: Chinese characters are interchangeable among East Asian languages. It's not like scripts of different sets of characters can't be unified.
Also, about 猫: Chinese characters are characters, not pictures. As an East Asian, I felt insulted.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee So, you would prefer to unify Chinese 猫 with 𓃠, which is totally not a picture but an Egyptian character that appears as E013 on the Egyptian word lists?
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley Of course not, why do you ask me such a question? Someone who only knows Egyptian script and someone who only knows Chinese characters can't understand each other's writing, don't you understand what I mean?
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Ian Wagner 🦀 :freebsd: :osm:replied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee idk… I feel slightly disqualified as a random white dude to comment but I think the decision was at least partially wrong. It’s not JUST a matter of font. Take the example of maps where you want everything to be representable in the local script. What do you do?
It’s tricky. It you can’t always leave it to fonts to display the right regional variant (which may differ considerably). Most maps, including ours, just display Japanese variants by convention.
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Ian Wagner 🦀 :freebsd: :osm: last edited by
@ianthetechie Yeah, it would have been nice to have at least some additional code to transform the shape of the glyphs, like an umlaut or combinatorial hangul.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee But why should that be a criterion, and not, say, whether one who knows what a cat looks like can recognise the glyph? Both characters depict the same kind of cats, after all. It's not like we're talking about unifying the Sumerian character for a small and cute cat with the Mayan character for a big and ferocious jaguar!
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley Well, a few characters could be recognized by someone who doesn't know Chinese characters. However, as an abstract set of characters, shouldn't only those who know Chinese characters be able to recognize them?
Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese recognize Chinese characters as a common set of characters enough to communicate in writing even though they don't speak to each other, and like Latin in Europe, the Literary Chinese served as the lingua franca of East Asia until the 20th century.
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Ian Wagner 🦀 :freebsd: :osm:replied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee yeah, this approach very much could work. I don't actually know the particulars, but it sounds like this is something that should cover like 99.9% of cases while avoiding bloat.
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by [email protected]
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Janne Morenreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee @riley
They're not interchangeable. They don't look the same and that is what's important to people.If you use "髙" in a Japanese text, people will think you're a Chinese speaker that doesn't know Japanese very well. It would lose you points in a school exam.
It'd be like telling Danes they now need to use the Swedish "ö" instead of the Danish "ø".
The point of Unicode was that you no longer had to switch fonts to render the same code point differently. Unification breaks that.
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Janne Morenreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by [email protected]
@hongminhee
They don't need to be split up. You could have "高" and "髙" as adjacent codepoints in a single unified CJK plane.To take my example just now, ä and æ, ö and ø and so on are all in the same collection despite being the "same" characters, rendered differently in different languages.
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Janne Moren last edited by
@jannem Well, I think the Japanese MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) is very picky about that, because they didn't really distinguish between the two in Japan, at least before.
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Janne Morenreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee
I know. It's kind of partly their fault we're in this mess already. -
洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Janne Moren last edited by
@jannem No, believe me, 高 and 髙 are the identical character with the same reading and the same meaning in all Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
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Janne Morenreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by [email protected]
@hongminhee
And yet, people have (sometimes strong) language-specific preferences for how the character should be written.And so you end up having to create and distribute separate fonts for the different CJK languages anyhow.
Not sure how that is an improvement over being able to define a single CJK font that encompasses the usage preferences of all its users.
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Janne Moren last edited by [email protected]
@jannem I believe such preferences, which are held by some people, mainly in Japan, were wrong from the beginning, i.e., from the creation of JIS X 0208 before Unicode.
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Janne Morenreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee
We could have a debate about descriptivism versus prescriptivism and so on - can a language area be "wrong" about its own use of language - but setting that aside, that matter of fact is that people in practice disagree about the characters being interchangeable. And that makes them not unified.If I'm wrong, then I'm sure China will be perfectly fine with standardizing on the Japanese way of writing them for all international use. They're the same after all.
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Janne Moren last edited by
@jannem I don't believe that simplified characters should be merged with the original characters (e.g., 體 & 体). I just want to say that it would be nicer if these characters with small stylistic differences (e.g., 高 & 髙, 对 & 対) were unified from the beginning.
Well, I also agree that we can't change reality in either direction.