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Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
- g09980 9y agoA favorite of Japanese study beginners is learning how to distinguish between ツ and シ, as well as between ソ and ン.
- cperciva 9y agoFor those of us who don't read Japanese, can you explain what the four characters in question mean?
- unfreezingly 9y agoThey're katakana characters, used mainly for transcribing foreign words. シ is "shi", ツ is "tsu", ン is "n" and ソ is "so".
- derefr 9y agoNo meaning per se, these are from the katakana syllabic alphabet. They make the sounds "tsu" (ツ), "shi" (シ), "so" (ソ) and "n" (ン).
- x1798DE 9y agoThey are phonetic characters, so they don't mean anything. シ (shi), ツ (tsu), ノ (no), ソ (so) and ン (n), all in katakana (used to write loan words and slang).
- tankenmate 9y agoActually Katakana derived from Kanji, but were typically only used for their sound rather than their meaning and a very very simplified version of how you would write the character quickly allowing for lifting the brush (Hiragana is the simplified version quickly without lifting the brush) roughly speaking; so you are mostly right but not completely. シ comes from the Chinese character 之, meaning either "of" or "this" ツ comes from the Chinese character 州 (although some researchers disagree), meaning "state" or "province" ソ comes from the Chinese character 會, meaning "meet", "party", or "interview" ン comes from the Chinese character 尓 (again not clear), meaning "you" or "that" This divergence happened because Chinese characters were used to write Japanese which is mostly from a different language family. Some Chinese characters were used by some for their meaning (ideogram) and used by others for the sound they made to approximate the sounds used in Japanese. Obviously Chinese influenced the Japanese language (for example numbers in Japanese sound similar to numbers in middle ages colloquial Hokkien). Over the last 1,000 years or so there have been numerous occasions for changes, standardisation and simplification. So even to those who study these changes over time it can sometimes be unclear.
- gfaure 9y ago> ソ comes from the Chinese character 會 ソ comes from 曾 ("once, at one point") not 會. Yes, those are different characters.
- gurkendoktor 9y agoIt gets worse. 曾 and 會 in your comment look clearly distinct to me in Safari, but if I check with Firefox, they suddenly look very similar. The trick is that 曾 is sometimes written with 八 as its "roof", which makes it look like 會, and sometimes with 丷, depending on your font. (Similar to 兑 and 兌 in the article)
- tjallingt 9y agoNot a Japanese reader so i can't fill you in on what exactly the characters mean but they are characters from the Japanese katakana script. Katakana are generally used for loanwords and each character represents a sound: ツ - tsu シ - shi ソ - so ン - n The reason these are difficult to learn is because the tiny differences in stroke angles (especially when handwritten) make it easy to confuse them.
- kunimu 9y agoOn their own they don't mean anything, however the first four may appear and indeed do as multiple words on their own, or as part of other words. Japanese has many homophones.
- Jach 9y agoAll the kana are easy to learn if you use mnemonics, though I admit handwriting recognition might be harder. It took me a moment to recall some of the mnemonics themselves, eventually you just see them as they are... For tsu, I can think of Two sewing needles, for shi, I can think of "she has a funny face", for so it's one "so-ing" needle, for n it's a cyclops who can only say "nnnnnn". (https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/ https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/ and https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ have some great mnemonics to start out, I remember only altering a few.)
- anw 9y agoIn college, my Japanese teacher told us that a lot of foreigners get these characters wrong, but if you know the stroke order then it's easy to see the difference. シ (shi) is written top to bottom. You can see that all the starting points for the strokes line up vertically on the left. Also, the last stroke curves from the bottom-left to the upper-right. ツ (tsu) is written from left to right. You can see that all the starting points for the strokes line up horizontally at the top. Also, the last stroke curves from the upper-right down to the bottom-left. ン (n) lke 'shi' is written top to bottom. The starting points for the strokes line up vertically on the left. It also uses the same direction for the longer, final stroke as 'shi'. ソ (so) like 'tsu' is written left to right. The starting points for the strokes line up vertically on the left. It also uses the same direction for the longer, final stroke as 'tsu'.
- craftyguy 9y agoIn my browser, those are just 4 identical empty squares. I guess I'm a beginner since I can't distinguish between them!
- ageofwant 9y agoInstalling the free hanazono fonts should sort you out For arch: pacman -S ttf-hanazono
- escherplex 9y agoInteresting. Installed hanazono font HanaMinPlus.ttf in Firefox as J-default and even in this comment section the distinction between katakana 'n' and 'so' is quite clear whereas using MS Gothic it's somewhat ambiguous. Even more so when the two fonts are juxtaposed in LibreOffice.
- fasdgafa 9y agoYou might want to look at some Kyokasho-tai typefaces; they should be pretty close to how we are taught to write.
- craftyguy 9y agoawesome, thank you for actually being helpful rather than just downvoting and moving on!
- malydok 9y agoHandwriting them makes for an 'a-ha' moment. ツ and ソ are written left-right while シ and ン top-down.
- yuhong 9y agoOne of the tables seem to show characters that are in Unicode BMP but not in JIS X 0208 (many I think came from JIS X 0212). Another table of course show characters not in the BMP.
- titanix2 9y agoInteresting read. Chinese characters and chinese character-like characters can be quickly hard to deal with as soon as you leave the BMP plan. The ids.txt file (Kanji database) is really a lifesaver in this case.
- ramshorns 9y agoThe 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.
- yuhong 9y agoIt will still probably take time. It was only recently that MySQL allowed more than 768 byte indexes for example, before which utf8 was commonly used instead of utf8mb4.
- yuhong 9y agoI just filed https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/issues/104 https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/issues/104 after editing the HN title and discovering problems.
- hudibras 9y agoIf you're interested in what the other mentioned kanji with regularly-used non-standard forms mean, here are some rough definitions: 餌 - animal feed, bait 遡 - go back in time; go upstream 遜 - humble, modest 謎 - riddle, enigma 餅 - rice cake; mochi
- jasonjei 9y agoChinese 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 Taiwan, many choose the Japanese variant to be "hip").
- kobeya 9y agoHistorically alphabet based phonetic descriptive written languages are a recent invention.
- hangonhn 9y agoWait. Can you clarify that? Most of the world outside of East Asia has had that since there was a written language.
- jwfxpr 9y agoThis gets into slightly pedantic definitional arguments, but broadly speaking the assertion is true that all known earliest writing systems were logographic (where a character represents a word, not a sound), though it is also true that no 'pure' logographia has ever been known to exist (except for an artificially constructed language called Toki Pona[1] from c.2001 that's barely worth mentioning). In practice, all known writing systems have some level of phonemic association to characters along with the ideagraphic, be it using a special subset of characters for phonetic representation or by associating the actual utterances of the words with their ideagrams. Examples of writing systems that used characters primarily to represent sounds did come later, though similarly, it is difficult to argue that any known language is purely phonetic. As a simple example in English, take '&' — though it is not a recognised letter, neither is it punctuation, and it is unarguably a glyph in the English writing system about which one could debate whether it is ideagramatic or logographic. (But I digress.) There are many types and varieties of phonetically representative writing systems — most of the earliest, like Linear B, are Syllabaries[2]. The earliest known surviving examples date from the mid-15C BCE, written forms of Mycaenian Greek[3]. Fully segmental writing systems (please distinguish 'fully' from 'purely', as elaborated above) are definitely younger than the rest. The earliest examples of these are often abjads and abugidas, which either eschew vowel representations or form consonant-vowel digraphs respectively[4]. The Phoenician alphabet, or more correctly the Proto-Canaanite script that was used by the Phoenicians, is the earliest surviving example of a segmental writing system — it is an abjad of which the earliest surviving examples are from roughly 1000BCE[5]. The earliest preserved writings that aren't just numbers date to about 3100BCE in Sumer[6], so predate preserved phonetic (excluding syllabic) writings by about 2000 years, and are in the order of 5000 and 3000 years old, respectively. So it's a big stretch to call it a 'recent invention', but certainly not as ancient as logographic or mnemonic writing systems. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B [3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek [4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida [5]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet [6]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing
- glandium 9y agoNot 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 (smell). You'd think the second is just 口 (mouth) added to the first, but it's not. Etymologically, 臭 is 自(nose, simplified form of 鼻)+犬(dog), but was simplified in the Jōyō list, and became 自+大. 嗅 was not part of the list back then. Which doesn't mean it didn't exist. It just means it was not recognized as regular enough by the ministry of education. 嗅 was only recently added to the list (2010), but was not simplified to remove the extra stroke, so it's 口+自+犬, leading to this funny inconsistency.
- dastbe 9y agonot sure if you're coming from a purely japanese background, but in chinese 左 and 右 both have the same stroke order for the upper left portion. and to show just how ridiculous han unification is, on my laptop your example makes no sense because the 臭 has a 犬!
- glandium 9y agoFacepalm. I actually was aware of the han unification of 自+犬 and 自+大 as 臭 (U+81ED), but forgot about it. There's now also 臭 (U+FA5C), that is 自+犬.
- mc32 9y agoAlso, radicals and roots can adjust shape to accommodate the partner, so they can vary in exact shape from one character context to another.
- dastbe 9y agothis is true, though these cases are fairly limited and 𠂇 is not a radical (you would look it up as 丿+ 1) after looking through my dictionary, it appears that 右 was originally written with 又 which is a pictograph of a right hand (no idea if the split-top was an accepted variation of the radical or the original form) and was later standardized to use 𠂇 for both characters. Japanese picked them up before the standardization occurred and so missed out on the homogenization. this also makes 友 a combination of the left and right hand, which imo is kind of cool.
- tekacs 9y agoI was stunned to find that no article has ever been submitted to HN with 'Han unification' in the title[0]. (there are comments [1] on the topic if you're interested to see HN's discussion on the topic as I was) [0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Han%20unification&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Han%20unification&sort=byPopul... [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Han%20unification&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Han%20unification&sort=byPopul...
- corey_moncure 9y agoThe depth and breadth of the diaspora around Chinese characters makes it extremely difficult to get these things right. Even this article presenting highly specific domain knowledge tees off with a questionable example: `The Japanese cross the blade in 刃, the Koreans don’t` Well Japanese have both 刀 for katana, the well known sword, and 刃 for yaiba / "blade". But in fact 刀 is used for many kinds of blade, by itself as `katana` and as a component of words like 太刀, 印刀, 日本刀, &c. (see http://kanji.quus.net/jyukugo1498/ http://kanji.quus.net/jyukugo1498/) Is this really pointing to a distinct concept from 刀 in Korean, as the article suggests?
- dastbe 9y agothen is а really a distinct concept from a? regardless of whether 刀 and 刃 have similar meaning in korean and japanese (in chinese the former refers to the knife/sword itself whereas the latter refers the edge of the knife), the unification of them across multiple languages makes it difficult to handle variations, nuance, and (most importantly for a forward thinking standard) divergence over time. that korean, japanese, and chinese have similar characters for historical reasons doesn't mean they are bound to be the same character forever in their respective languages. that another commenter below me can't easily transmit to me the character for "smelly" in japanese because whatever font i use is preferring the chinese character for it is a signal that the standard is broken.
- emodendroket 9y agoThose characters are not unified. What the article is actually saying is that when Koreans write 刃 they place the short stroke in a difference place than the Japanese do (and users of traditional Chinese place it in still another).
- dastbe 9y agorereading my words i realize i was ambiguous; i didnt mean to say that 刀 and 刃 were unified (how would i have written them?) but that unifying those characters across multiple languages is ignoring that they have nuanced meaning based on what language they're in. then add in your point that the written forms themselve are diverging over time.
- yeukhon 9y ago> 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 (stopped) 己 is self So 自己 is me/self, while 已經 means already. There is also 巳, which is ancient Chinese clock means 9-11am I believe.
- yuhong 9y agoAt least these are all in the BMP...
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoI can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱
- yeukhon 9y agoI said in handwritings if not careful.
- microcolonel 9y agoI think yeukhon means that if you get lazy and write 已 or 己 with a single stroke (easy to do with a ball-point pen), they are basically indistinguishable.
- jack1243star 9y agoNo educated Chinese-writer will write those in a single stroke AFAIK
- shard 9y agoI think you will be amazed at what can be written in a single stroke when you are in a hurry.
- Typhon 9y agoHan unification was really a pretty stupid idea.
- mjevans 9y agoIs the 'unspecified' rendering supposed to be the same as the 'popular' rendering (on the right); or is it supposed to be the one in the middle? For me seemingly every example's left most and right most column (for the sets of 3) looked identical, while the middle form was different.
- ksec 9y agoAnd that is why sometimes I wonder if CJK encoding should something else entirely rather then part of Unicode making Han Unification.
- stevebmark 9y agothis whole blog is super creepy
- greggman 9y agoI wish more handwritten kanji input systems would use stroke order and count as a weight and not a filter. As a learner is generally know the stroke order when looking at an unknown kanji but as most input method filter on order and count a single wrong order or count means the matching kanji doesn't even show up in the list of possible matches
- wodenokoto 9y agoAll the proprietary systems do that. For some reason, proprietary Chinese handwritten input systems are more widely available than Japanese. macOS and ios are good examples. Ships with a good one for Chinese and nothing for japanese. If you buy a Sony android phone you'll get a good handwritten Japanese input out-of-the-box. The reason is because basic stroke order information is freely available, but you need much more information to build a good system (you need common abbreviations and mistakes, fx)
- greggman 9y agoI'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. maybe this particular issue isn't that important? the one that bites me the most is pressing ESC to cancel IME editing and having it exit some dialog because the browser/os passed the ESC all the down to the app when it was meant only for the IME. I get there are probably no easy solutions tho this is also a place where VSCode fails because VSCode and any other is based text editing in html needs more IME info than current broswer APIs provide
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- Manishearth 9y ago"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.
- gorgedev 9y agoI am developing a program using a webbrowser control, for my own use, to aid in learning the Jouyou Kanji and their readings. I need some text controls to be exclusively latin, hiragana, or katakana. The state of IME support in Windows is very poor. WPF (legacy software?)does not support this at all with reported bugs going back five years. Winforms does, but doesn't meet my requirements. Html does define the inputmode attribute, but this only works as a hint to smart phone on-screen keyboards. The inputmode attribute is totaly ignored by desktop browsers. The Microsoft IME does not appear to have any API which can determine the current state or switch between modes. However, there is currently a Html5 working group on an API for IME control. In this day and age of multinational software, this is truly pathetic.
- GolDDranks 9y agoI see 「つかむ」 often being written as 掴む, but that seems to be a common abbreviation too, since the official version is 摑む. The simplification 國 → 国 is just applied there, similarly to the 辶 → ⻌ case.
- jhanschoo 9y agoIsn't there some form of case folding of one of the characters into the other?