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
@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
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley The reason bopomofo and Japanese kana look so different from each other is because each letter comes from a different Chinese character.
The resemblance between Japanese Kana and Devanagari is, well, either a coincidence or you have weird eyes, because they don't look anything alike to me.
If you don't know anything about Chinese characters or East Asian scripts, please don't make any more unreasonable claims.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee I am pretty miffed by your apparent wilful ignorance of the fascinating histories of non-Chinese writing systems, let alone the fact that just because some other languages borrow a number of Chinese-derived characters for their writing systems doesn't mean they're using them in the same way, with the same shapes, and the same meanings as the official guardians of the Chinese language in the imperial republic's capital of Taipei insist them to do.
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@hongminhee @riley @xarvos The individual hiragana characters have no Indic origin. Its usual arrangement あ-か-さ-た-... ([vowel only]-k-s-t-...) resembles how Sanskrit characters are conventionally arranged in a table. This resemblance is believed to derive from works written by Japanese Buddhists who studied texts originally from India.
https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/ja/features/z1304_00195.html -
Riley S. Faelanreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by [email protected]
@hongminhee No, I'm making explicit how absurd the concept of Han Unification is in light of other commonly accepted policies of Unicode.
Insomuch as the code space is a problem, they should have specified Korean letterforms to be canonically encoded fully in jamo, not as precomposed syllables, and possibly place the precomposed syllables somewhere outside the BMP.
Unifying Japanese characters with similar-looking Chinese characters is as absurd as unifying Greek 'Α' with Coptic 'Ⲁ' just because the latter is a reshaped form of the former.
Spoiler: the Unicode Consortium actually tried that, which is why the base Greek letters are in a block called "Greek and Coptic", U+0370 – U+03FF. It turned out to suck so badly that most of these were retroactively reconceptualised as Greek-only letters, and a separate block of "Coptic", U+2C80 — U+2CFF, was established for mostly the same letters, except in Coptic-only forms.
There's still a few letters in the old "Greek and Coptic" block that only make sense in Coptic texts, such as 'Ϣ', which nobody in their right mind would want to unify with the Cyrillic 'Ш' merely because that's where it came from when the Cyrillic alphabet was composed by a man who might or might not have been called Kirillos when he had trouble finding a Greek letter that might correspond to the Bulgarian 'ш' sound.
There isn't one, because this sound is not used in the Greek language. But Egyptian used to have this sound, and had a series of letters depicting reeds in a pond to represent it, until eventually the Demotic form of the latest version got adopted into the mostly-Greek-based writing system of the post-late form of the Egyptian language that is Coptic, and through it, into the mostly-Greek-based Cyrillic.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by [email protected]
@hongminhee The reason bopomofo and kana look different is, they were created separately. The Japanese syllables, as a concept, are not derived from the Chinese script. They're derived from a Brahmic/Sanskrit idea of how syllables are supposed to work, and that's why the gojûon looks so much like varṇamālā. The letterforms might have been re-rebused from common Japanese Kanji characters in use at the time, possibly because the Brahmic letterforms aren't exactly optimal for being written with a Japanese-style writing brush; possibly because whoever brought a Brahmic script to Japan had travelled around enough to see that there were many different and not-always-mutually-intelligible forms of Brahmic scripts around already.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to ポット🫖 last edited by [email protected]
@pot Pay careful attention to the 51st sound of the 50-sound table: the venerable terminal 'ん'. Separating the terminal sound of a syllable into a distinct letter while keeping the preceding consonant and vowel together doesn't make sense in any of the major Chinese ways of syllabic word composition analysis, with the possible exception of the new linguistic ideas brought in by the Yuan dynasty, which I'm not particularly familiar with. Neither bopomofo nor fanqie does that. But it's relatively natural outcome of applying the common Brahmic way of building an abugida — rather than a syllabary — to the Japanese syllable composition.