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A Spectre is Haunting Unicode
- ume 8y agoThis is utterly wonderful - brought to mind the film Brazil's fly in a typewriter. I'm now going to have to go down the rabbit hole of each of these ghost kanji. Good times.
- Freak_NL 8y agoI wonder if some interested Japanese ever got together to simply find new sensible meanings and words to retroactively apply to these ghost kanji. As a sort of creative pass-time.
- nneonneo 8y agoThe article links to the Nico Nico Douga Wiki (a wiki for creative works), in which each of the 12 characters is imagined to be the name of a Japanese youkai (a type of spirit/demon/monster): http://dic.nicovideo.jp/a/%E5%B9%BD%E9%9C%8A%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97 http://dic.nicovideo.jp/a/%E5%B9%BD%E9%9C%8A%E6%96%87%E5%AD%... (Japanese). It’s also quite a neat coincidence that there are exactly 12 remaining unattested characters (down from ~60 before the thorough investigation), because 12 is a rather auspicious number in East Asian tradition. For example, 妛 (山 mountain atop 女 female) is imagined to mean a yama-uba (traditional “mountain witch” youkai) who lives at the foot of the mountain (as befitting the “女” position in the character). There’s a good tradition of reusing old or outdated characters in new contexts. For example, in Chinese, the archaic character 囧, meaning “window” (modern term 窗) has been resurrected to mean “embarrassed” or “awkward” due to its pictorial resemblance to a facial expression.
- vorg 8y agoThere also happens to be exactly 12 standard ideograph characters that were erroneously encoded in the Unihan compatibility character block (i.e. 﨎﨏﨑﨓﨔﨟﨡﨣﨤﨧﨨﨩).
- duckerude 8y agoThe fixating effect of digitalization is scary. New characters were introduced by accident, and although they're useless, they're probably not going anywhere. But what about the inverse? Will character sets still be able to change and grow new characters now that they're standardized like this?
- innocenat 8y agoThe answer is easy -- No, it won't be able to change and grow. Have been to more than one character museum where they show evolution of character. For most of the history you can see some change between 10-20 years, but it stays completely same for last 20 years or so.
- emodendroket 8y agoTwenty? I don't know what you mean. If you pick up a Japanese book published in 1960 the characters are the same ones they use now. Nobody was using bone script or anything.
- innocenat 8y agoI did not talk specifically about Japanese, and I don't think the OP did either. And I should clarify for that -- character mostly stop changing once printing press is introduced, and stop almost completely once digitization is completed. Of course common language get digitize long before, but all common language seems to have digitization completed 10-20 years ago.
- rspeer 8y agoThere are languages in India with tens of millions of speakers whose digital representations are still poorly implemented, partially because the speakers of those languages rely on English instead of their own language when using computers.
- robjan 8y agoYou are thinking about alphabet-based languages where the creation of a new word does not involve the creation of a new character. We are frequently creating new words which require "workarounds" (sometimes just using a romanisation) until it's properly encoded.
- ape4 8y agoLike DNA coding mistakes
- malkia 8y agoBasically "NaN"s in character form :) - fascinating read!
- userbinator 8y agoIt somewhat reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_method#Early_Cangjie_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_method#Early_Cangjie_s... A particular "feature" of this early system is that if you send random lowercase words to the character generator, it will attempt to construct Chinese characters according to the Cangjie decomposition rules, sometimes causing strange, unknown characters to appear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mingzhu_xiaoziku1.PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mingzhu_xiaoziku1.PNG
- reaperducer 8y agoIf they're in Unicode, it should be possible to register ghost characters as a ghost domain name, right?
- NVRM 8y agoWith Punycodes?
- zamadatix 8y agoI don't see why not. Hell, it's probably possible to register a domain name for characters that aren't even defined in Unicode yet.
- reaperducer 8y agoSo you could take a chance registering some not-yet-defined code point, and possibly end up with the next poop emoji as your e-mail address! Worst lottery ever.
- mistaken 8y agoAny reason why these charcters cannot be revoked if nobody uses them?
- TheDong 8y agoHow do you prove a unicode character is unused? Look at every database field in the entire world? Every book someone has ever typed on a computer and printed? See what fonts include them or don't? You can't define what an unused character looks like once it's in the standard... even less if it's already available on almost every modern computer. People have already used these "ghost characters" when describing them, as jokes in their online handles, etc... This article and now this comment include "妛" which is one such character. Furthermore, how would you even remove them? Tell all font authors "unicode point X now shouldn't be included in your font"... why would they ever bother to remove something from a font? And what would be the benefit? Unicode offers enough codepoints that there's plenty of space left over for whatever garbage you wish to include, like new emojis and super-astral-aether-planar characters.
- garmaine 8y agoThis blog post used them.
- int_19h 8y agohttps://www.unicode.org/policies/stability_policy.html https://www.unicode.org/policies/stability_policy.html Encoding Stability Applicable Version: Unicode 2.0+ Once a character is encoded, it will not be moved or removed. This policy ensures that implementers can always depend on each version of the Unicode Standard being a superset of the previous version. The Unicode Standard may deprecate the character (that is, formally discourage its use), but it will not reallocate, remove, or reassign the character.
- mjevans 8y agoPresumably they can also be entered as part of a passphrase. Now that it's published it's even more likely.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- narrator 8y agoThis reminds me of the famous mistake of "referer" being spelled with only 1 'r' in the HTTP standard.
- maaaats 8y agoAs a kid that tinkered with programming/computers before I learned English, this has stuck as something I always misspell.
- rossdavidh 8y agoSo, since we have them and they're not going away, we should invent a meaning for them. Obviously, one of them will have the meaning "ghost character". Other than that, meanings like "mistake that would have been simple to correct if it had been caught quickly, but now it is too late", or "something that slips through the cracks of bureaucracy", or "mistake that does not cause an actual problem, but seems wrong".
- Agathos 8y agoI like these suggestions. It sounds like they are all suited to commenting legacy code.
- rossdavidh 8y agoOuch. Too true.
- UncleEntity 8y agoI say just leave them alone so drunk teenagers can get them tattooed and get laughed at by native Japanese speakers.
- rossdavidh 8y agoOne of them should mean "that thing when someone likes the look of foreign characters and gets a tattoo or buys a shirt or something, without finding out what it means".
- HelloNurse 8y agoThey could be given sarcastic Unicode names like MEANINGLESS KANJI-STYLE TATTOO #1 to #12.
- ezoe 8y agoAny tattooed Japanese glyph is funny for Japanese because We didn't have a culture for tattooing letters. Especially by 楷書体(regular script)
- garmaine 8y ago> In the end only one character had neither a clear source nor any historical precedent: 彁. The most likely explanation is that it was created as a misreading of the 彊 character, but no specific indcident was uncovered. I think I've uncovered a new English word, "indcident." I wonder what it means and how it is pronounced?
- akx 8y agoThe Google Translate Chinese text-to-speech for that core set of ghost kanji is also spooky. https://translate.google.com/#zh-CN/en/%E5%A6%9B%E6%8C%A7%E6%9A%83%E6%A4%A6%E6%A7%9E%E8%9F%90%E8%A2%AE%E9%96%A0%E9%A7%B2%E5%A2%B8%E5%A3%A5%E5%BD%81 https://translate.google.com/#zh-CN/en/%E5%A6%9B%E6%8C%A7%E6...
- invalidusernam3 8y agoObciouly not exactly the same, but this article reminded me of the scroll lock key. Many people seem to have forgotten its original purpose: When PC Magazine asked an executive of keyboard manufacturer Key Tronic about the key's purpose, he replied "I don't know, but we put it on ours, too"
- dbenhur 8y agoWikipedia remembers: "The Scroll Lock key was meant to lock all scrolling techniques, and is a vestige of the original IBM PC keyboard. In the original design, Scroll Lock was intended to modify the behavior of the arrow keys. When the Scroll Lock mode was on, the arrow keys would scroll the contents of a text window instead of moving the cursor. In this usage, Scroll Lock is a toggling lock key like Num Lock or Caps Lock, which have a state that persists after the key is released." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_lock#Window_scrolling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_lock#Window_scrolling
- ComputerGuru 8y agoIt still works that way too in a real vtty. Hit scroll lock to scroll through the text buffer at the terminal in a text-only session with the up and down arrows on BSD. Very handy.
- mrguyorama 8y agoMy modern keyboard even still contains little arrow glyphs on the number pad keys to correspond with them.
- collinmanderson 8y agoIsn't that for num-lock? (or when num-lock is off?)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]