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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 th

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 (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 ago
not 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 ago
  Facepalm. 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 ago
  Also, 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 ago
    this 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.
    - glandium 9y ago
      According to Japanese dictionaries, 友 comes from 又+又, which makes it a combination of two right hands.
    - glandium 9y ago
      > Japanese picked them up before the standardization occurred and so missed out on the homogenization. Actually, the writing with 𠂇 is older than the japanese using the characters. The wikipedia page on stroke order suggests the homogenization in stroke order might have happened last century.
- glandium 9y ago
  So interestingly, for 左 and 右, the etymological stroke order is the japanese one. It was "simplified" in mainland China and Taiwan.
  - patal 9y ago
    Do you have a source for your claim? Particularly, you're suggesting that the stroke order for the top left part was once different in China. I'd really like to see a document on this.
    - dastbe 9y ago
      I can buy that, as I know the top left portion in chinese historically is for the left hand. If the historical variation of right was for the right hand, that would make a lot of sense.
      - patal 9y ago
        Are you really suggesting that writers changed hands during writing a single character? That sounds totally impractical. Also, that does not explain why there should be a different stroke order.
        Manishearth 9y ago
        No, 左 is "left" and 右 is "right", they're saying that the 𠂇 radical itself means "left hand", and they later added a similar one for "right hand". Looking it up (on wiktionary, at least) it seems like originally 又 was "right hand", however if you look at really old versions of that character it looks mostly like a mirror of 𠂇. Interestingly, Wiktionary lists both left and right as phonosemantic compounds where the phonetic part is "left hand" or "right hand" and the semantic part is "assist" and "mouth" (I think in this case the "mouth" is used to bolster the "pronounced like" of the phonosemantic compound, since it's used on the right side not the left). This seems to be because the word for "left hand" became the word for "left" and same for "right hand", so they're pronounced the same; and the semantic component was added later to bolster/specialize the glyph. Anyway, it seems like the 𠂇 radical in 右 is etymologically a variant of 又 which is a mirror of 𠂇 (well, a mirror of a three-pronged historical form of that) except it was rotated around the glyph so that it looks exactly like 𠂇 but the stroke order is reversed.
emodendroket 9y ago
My biggest frustration with Han unification is that on my phone Japanese text appears with Chinese variants and there's no way to correct this without rooting the phone or setting the system language to Japanese (both kind of a lot of work to get something working that should just work out of the box). People say "well, what's the big deal? You can read it anyway," but think about how you'd feel if English text randomly had Cyrillic or Greek equivalents mixed in with the Latin letters and see how you'd feel.
- ksec 9y ago
  My exact same feeling. Even if the Han Character, as in the Han unification are the same, the glyph matters a lot in context. It a little like replacing every french word / character à with just a. And à is only accessible with variant fonts which is not supported by most OS, and if you have your system locale as French every English word would have à instead of a.
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    Is this because developers have their locale set to their language, so it looks good for them, and they're forgetting to define the language of the text? That's the case for HTML: <HTML lang="zh"> But I don't know about other instances.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Does that work in Android? I've never seen anything look right really. And for apps I don't think it's even an option. Either way it's annoying to set people up to screw up in this way. And the unification also means it's quite difficult to get multiple variants into the same text.
Manishearth 9y ago
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.
- glandium 9y ago
  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 < 90° (except in fonts, as you note). 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).
  - Manishearth 9y ago
    > Do you mean the fact that in the former, the angle tends to be 90° while in the latter it tends to be < 90° No, I mean that the end of the stroke in the former is often hooked and crosses the third stroke, whereas in the latter the second stroke stops short of the third stroke and isn't hooked. I'm not 100% sure; and I'm still learning :) I don't think it's a common character on its own in Chinese either; I know it as a radical.
    - glandium 9y ago
      Do you mean this? http://www.geocities.jp/yokomoko3/kihon-5.jpg http://www.geocities.jp/yokomoko3/kihon-5.jpg In japanese, there is not, but there is this difference in how the second and third strokes interact.

dastbe 9y ago

not 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 ago
Facepalm. 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 ago
Also, 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 ago
  this 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.
  - glandium 9y ago
    According to Japanese dictionaries, 友 comes from 又+又, which makes it a combination of two right hands.
  - glandium 9y ago
    > Japanese picked them up before the standardization occurred and so missed out on the homogenization. Actually, the writing with 𠂇 is older than the japanese using the characters. The wikipedia page on stroke order suggests the homogenization in stroke order might have happened last century.
glandium 9y ago
So interestingly, for 左 and 右, the etymological stroke order is the japanese one. It was "simplified" in mainland China and Taiwan.
- patal 9y ago
  Do you have a source for your claim? Particularly, you're suggesting that the stroke order for the top left part was once different in China. I'd really like to see a document on this.
  - dastbe 9y ago
    I can buy that, as I know the top left portion in chinese historically is for the left hand. If the historical variation of right was for the right hand, that would make a lot of sense.
    - patal 9y ago
      Are you really suggesting that writers changed hands during writing a single character? That sounds totally impractical. Also, that does not explain why there should be a different stroke order.
      - Manishearth 9y ago
        No, 左 is "left" and 右 is "right", they're saying that the 𠂇 radical itself means "left hand", and they later added a similar one for "right hand". Looking it up (on wiktionary, at least) it seems like originally 又 was "right hand", however if you look at really old versions of that character it looks mostly like a mirror of 𠂇. Interestingly, Wiktionary lists both left and right as phonosemantic compounds where the phonetic part is "left hand" or "right hand" and the semantic part is "assist" and "mouth" (I think in this case the "mouth" is used to bolster the "pronounced like" of the phonosemantic compound, since it's used on the right side not the left). This seems to be because the word for "left hand" became the word for "left" and same for "right hand", so they're pronounced the same; and the semantic component was added later to bolster/specialize the glyph. Anyway, it seems like the 𠂇 radical in 右 is etymologically a variant of 又 which is a mirror of 𠂇 (well, a mirror of a three-pronged historical form of that) except it was rotated around the glyph so that it looks exactly like 𠂇 but the stroke order is reversed.

emodendroket 9y ago

My biggest frustration with Han unification is that on my phone Japanese text appears with Chinese variants and there's no way to correct this without rooting the phone or setting the system language to Japanese (both kind of a lot of work to get something working that should just work out of the box). People say "well, what's the big deal? You can read it anyway," but think about how you'd feel if English text randomly had Cyrillic or Greek equivalents mixed in with the Latin letters and see how you'd feel.

ksec 9y ago
My exact same feeling. Even if the Han Character, as in the Han unification are the same, the glyph matters a lot in context. It a little like replacing every french word / character à with just a. And à is only accessible with variant fonts which is not supported by most OS, and if you have your system locale as French every English word would have à instead of a.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  Is this because developers have their locale set to their language, so it looks good for them, and they're forgetting to define the language of the text? That's the case for HTML: <HTML lang="zh"> But I don't know about other instances.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Does that work in Android? I've never seen anything look right really. And for apps I don't think it's even an option. Either way it's annoying to set people up to screw up in this way. And the unification also means it's quite difficult to get multiple variants into the same text.

Manishearth 9y ago

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.

glandium 9y ago
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 < 90° (except in fonts, as you note). 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).
- Manishearth 9y ago
  > Do you mean the fact that in the former, the angle tends to be 90° while in the latter it tends to be < 90° No, I mean that the end of the stroke in the former is often hooked and crosses the third stroke, whereas in the latter the second stroke stops short of the third stroke and isn't hooked. I'm not 100% sure; and I'm still learning :) I don't think it's a common character on its own in Chinese either; I know it as a radical.
  - glandium 9y ago
    Do you mean this? http://www.geocities.jp/yokomoko3/kihon-5.jpg http://www.geocities.jp/yokomoko3/kihon-5.jpg In japanese, there is not, but there is this difference in how the second and third strokes interact.