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Actually the situation is more complicated than that. Japanese Kanji include some characters that were created by the Japanese, following the basic principles

Actually the situation is more complicated than that. Japanese Kanji include some characters that were created by the Japanese, following the basic principles of Chinese characters, over the past 1000~ years. Everywhere that Chinese characters have been used there have been local variations. There have also been various hand-written simplifications, which in some cases became "new" characters that over time were repurposed. It is also not true that simplified characters could be do again without changing code points; it is true for Japanese but for Chinese simplification there were several characters that were "merged" i.e. two formerly different characters are now written the same way. I would actually argue that the idea of "code points" makes no sense for Chinese characters, and that instead an approach based on the components of each character should have been used.

emodendroket 8y ago
Yes, everyone likes to talk about 働 and 峠. These characters are rare and the set is not expanding. Anyway, sure the simplification could happen. You just take the code point for 國 and start rendering 国. The principle that the font affects the rendering is already set with Han unification (probably not a good decision but we are stuck with it now). At worst you end up with redundancies (even in the Chinese case automated transition from simplified to traditional characters is mostly right; if you're going the other way it is always right).
- gurkendoktor 8y ago
  > even in the Chinese case automated transition from simplified to traditional characters is mostly right; if you're going the other way it is always right Even Traditional-to-Simplified has its pitfalls because some characters have a 1:2 mapping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_character_simplification#2_to_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_charact...
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Good catch, although I think the nature of Japanese use of characters makes this less likely.

emodendroket 8y ago

Yes, everyone likes to talk about 働 and 峠. These characters are rare and the set is not expanding. Anyway, sure the simplification could happen. You just take the code point for 國 and start rendering 国. The principle that the font affects the rendering is already set with Han unification (probably not a good decision but we are stuck with it now). At worst you end up with redundancies (even in the Chinese case automated transition from simplified to traditional characters is mostly right; if you're going the other way it is always right).

gurkendoktor 8y ago
> even in the Chinese case automated transition from simplified to traditional characters is mostly right; if you're going the other way it is always right Even Traditional-to-Simplified has its pitfalls because some characters have a 1:2 mapping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_character_simplification#2_to_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_charact...
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Good catch, although I think the nature of Japanese use of characters makes this less likely.