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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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.
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Janne Morenreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee I think that's really the point: to at least some users, those differences aren't small.
Here in Japan there's another, related issue where some family and place names were/are traditionally written with variant characters. That worked fine when everything was written by hand, but those variants got left out when defining print types and fonts, leaving a lot of people frustrated about it.
And yes, it is what it is. We're human; nothing ever ends up 100% clean and logical
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@riley @hongminhee fraktur is a typeface though. the reason for that character in unicode is for maths than languages itself. あ doesn't have any historical relationship with the others. others, while related, are entirely different alphabets whose characters don't even have a 1-1 mapping—hebrew isn't even alphabet—so it doesn't make sense either
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Janne Moren last edited by
@jannem Yes, I know that some Japanese people are picky about the kanji form of their surnames, but I believe that the pickiness came from the fact that when JIS X 0208 was defined in the first place, it assigned some style differences as separate code points. Why I believe that is because if you learn Chinese calligraphy, you'll find that there are far more style differences in Chinese characters than that, and people don't get picky about the ones that aren't encoded in JIS X 0208 or Unicode.
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Janne Morenreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee You can see it the other way: the reason Japan encoded these differences is because people felt strongly about them.
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Janne Moren last edited by
@jannem Well, probably not. The JIS X 0208 standard is moving toward bringing back together code points that were too finely split. They were split without much thought in the first place.
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@xarvos If you look closely, you'll notice that both the Latin and Cyrillic ones are derived from the Greek one, which, in turn, is derived from the Foenician one, which is derived from something close to the Hebrew one.
Similarly, either the Foenician or an early Greek version became an early Brahmic version, whence (admittedly, through some pretty heavy reshuffling) eventually the Dewanagari अ came from. Japanese あ is probably redrawn, but the arrangement of kana is very clearly derived from Dewanagari, probably brought in by the same people who brought Buddhism to Japan. They are all related. Probably to the alphabetic subsystem of Hieratic Egyptian, too, but outside the animal pictures, I'm not really fluent in Egyptian.
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
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@riley @hongminhee あ coming from devanagari is a stretch. the entire kana (both ones) are derived from chinese characters
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@xarvos Why do you suppose the 五十音 table doesn't look at all like 注音符號 table, but does markedly resemble common renderings of the वर्णमाला table?
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@xarvos All the more reasons to unify the Fraktur letters with the ones that may not be in Fraktur!
Although, on a second thought, it would be kind of neat to have Mathematical Fraktur Katakana in Unicode ...
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee So, why aren't these two characters unified?
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by