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Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
- danbolt 8y agoAre there any developers with Unicode experience able to comment on this? I know the character for Reiwa has been reserved but I’m unsure if programmers are familiar with Y2K-esque bugs that could happen.
- ardy42 8y ago> Are there any developers with Unicode experience able to comment on this? I know the character for Reiwa has been reserved but I’m unsure if programmers are familiar with Y2K-esque bugs that could happen. They create a brand new character for the era names? I find that a little hard to believe, because Wikipedia [1] already has the Reiwa era listed and my computer has a font that can display the kanji for it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_era_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_era_names
- Gaelan 8y agohttp://blog.unicode.org/2018/09/new-japanese-era.html http://blog.unicode.org/2018/09/new-japanese-era.html was posted here yesterday, but the short answer is that the era can be referred to using two existing characters (for the current era: 平成) or with one new combined one (㍻). Wiki is using the former, so it doesn't need software support.
- triodan 8y agoIt's a combination of two existing characters, the rei as in meirei/命令 (order, command) and wa as in heiwa/平和 (peace, harmony). No new characters need to be reserved.
- qlk1123 8y agoAlso, this seems to be the first time that Japanese Royal choose the kanjis from their classical literature[1] instead of Chinese literature. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB
- tanilama 8y agoRei, 令, in this case means 'good, fortunate', not command.
- archgoon 8y agoHuh, according to Jim Breen's dictionary (http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic) 'good, fortunate' is '礼' (rei). '令' (rei) is listed as 'command, decree'. The official character that is being used is '令'. Is there some rule or convention that explains why 令 means 'good, fortunate' here? Is it due to the usage in the 7th century poetry that is referenced in the article?
- tanilama 8y agoIn this particular case, '令月' means[1], a good month. https://kotobank.jp/word/%E4%BB%A4%E6%9C%88-660939 https://kotobank.jp/word/%E4%BB%A4%E6%9C%88-660939 If we have to trace back even further, it can date back to the ancient Chinese classic, the Classic of Poetry, where it is being used as good/respectful: https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%BB%A4%E9%97%BB%E4%BB%A4%E6%9C%9B https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%BB%A4%E9%97%BB%E4%BB%A4%E6%...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- comex 8y agoEven though there's an explanation, I've seen a bunch of negative reaction to the name from Japanese people online because of the association with "command", also linking it to the current prime minister and his relatively militaristic politics.
- qlk1123 8y ago$ echo "令和" | hexdump -C 00000000 e4 bb a4 e5 92 8c 0a |.......| 00000007 Obviously the individual kanjis are reserved in CJK plane. But how is it related to Y2K-esque bugs?
- james_s_tayler 8y agoBecause this stuff is hardcoded into the standard library (at least in Java I know it is) and I assume it's the same for other things. For example any dates in the future like 2020 will show up wrong. Where it ought to be reiwa 2 it will be Heisei 31 which doesn't even exist. Heaven forbid you were doing something crazy like matching on strings for the date etc you could get into a world of hurt. Mostly though you always work with real, actual dates and use the standard library support for the Japanese era date to calculate outputs for display only. Mostly it just means there are a few forms/invoices out there with a non-existent date on them but oh well.
- glandium 8y agoHeisei 31 is this year. Heisei 32 and above are the ones that don't exist.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoThankfully I don't live in Japan and have to deal with that system on a daily basis.
- fenomas 8y agoThe new name just uses standard characters, but what you're probably referring to is the fact that Unicode 12.1 will have a character for the two of them compressed into one glyph. Details: http://blog.unicode.org/2018/09/new-japanese-era.html http://blog.unicode.org/2018/09/new-japanese-era.html Compressed glyphs like that are sometimes used on paperwork and whatnot, but everyday usage just uses the standard characters.
- mappu 8y agoWhat are the benefits of this approach compared to a ligature at the font-level?
- fenomas 8y agoI'm not competent to answer that, but the "merged glyph" versions of the other four modern era names date from older encodings like EUC and shift-JIS, and are presumably in unicode for compatibility. So the rationale for adding a new one may just be extending that set.
- masklinn 8y agoThe square / single-glyph version is only used in some / limited contexts, in most contexts (including the emperor's eventual posthumous name) heisei would be written and displayed "normally".
- needle0 8y agoAside from the new combined glyph, One potentially major issue is that the character 令 exists in two locations in Unicode: U+4EE4 and U+F9A8. The latter is a compatibility variant, and depending on the how smart the text processing code used is, it may or may not be considered equal to the former. Hence, that's now one more thing to test and work around for the poor engineers working karoshi hours, only given one month to implement changes on and test the ungodly numbers of computer systems all around the country. Really, this one-month compromise between conservatives and engineers was pretty much the worst possible result: too short to work with any breathing room, too long to throw up hands and abandon the idea of implementing it in time.
- SECProto 8y agoAnyone else gets display issues with 令? It shows up incorrectly in certain android locations (keyboard, hangouts) but looks fine in firefox. The stroke order illustration on jisho also has the last stroke wrong [1] [1] https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%A4%20%23kanji https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%A4%20%23kanji
- fiblye 8y agoNot wrong. Just a difference in how fonts display them. Like how ‘a’ sometimes has a little hook above it and sometimes doesn’t.
- fenomas 8y agoThis is basically just a font difference. The angular version (in the text of your link) is the more typewritten style, while the version in the stroke order graph is the more handwritten style. It's roughly analogous to the way "g" would usually descend on the right when written by hand, but descends on the left in most typefaces.
- fraculus 8y agoThis might be a problem arising because of Han unification. In Japanese, the character is commonly written with a vertical final stroke (at least in print), whereas in Chinese it's a diagonally down and to the right. However, they are encoded as the same in Unicode. What gets displayed depends on the font choice, possibly aided by somewhat hacky language hints. This particular character is the second example in the list of "Examples of language-dependent glyphs" in the Wikipedia article [1]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_language-dependent_glyphs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_...
- dang 8y agoDiscussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19528287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19528287 I think we can treat the actual name as significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...).
- tenf-sefhu 8y agoOh thanks
- euske 8y agoThis is stupid. Make no mistake: this is not the Japanese "culture". Most private organizations in Japan have already switched to the Western calendar, and its only user is the Japanese government (although it's one of the biggest ones, sadly). They should stop wasting their time and energy for this farce. And yes, one could argue that this will create extra IT jobs that would be unnecessary if they abandoned the system, as this will affect so many legacy systems. Also it will please certain nationalistic right wingers here. But nonetheless it is a self-imposed complexity that we could opt out if we were smart.
- Camillo 8y agoIs it really such a big deal? It's not like they're _introducing_ regnal eras, it's just a new era name for the system they were already using. BTW, both this comment and the article hint at a connection with right-wing nationalism. I won't claim to understand Japanese politics, but AFAIK Abe's government is increasing immigration to Japan to far higher levels than ever before. Surely that's going to have a far bigger impact on Americanizing Japan than retiring era names ever could, isn't it?
- mikekchar 8y agoThe article refers to Abe's government as "ultra-conservative", not as "right-wing nationalist". I would not say that Abe is nationalist in the normal definition of the word. Japanese politics tends towards right wing, though it tends to be more of an old school conservatism: old money, but with a sense of responsibility towards the people. So, for example, there aren't a lot of services performed by the government and it is expected that businesses somehow voluntarily pay to have these things done. In my rural town the government does not mow the sides road, or trim branches on trees, or maintain the parks. That's pretty much all done on a volunteer basis by local businesses, or residents. There is a big rota and you have to go out once a month and do some work. Financially, things are conservative as well. Abenomics is literally Reganomics with "Regan" replaced by "Abe" -- trickle down theory and all. And it works just as well as Reganomics didn't too ;-) Abe has also been quite busy trying to rewrite the constitution so that Japan can get into international conflicts where their allies are involved. Previously Japan was only allowed to get into conflicts where Japan itself was under threat. There is some speculation that the emperor only abdicated in order to force the government to do a bunch of constitutional work and delay the constitutional work that Abe had ordered. Abe managed to survive a general election, so if that was the goal it ended up being fruitless. In terms of nationalism, I don't think that Japan (or its government) fits the definition. There are protectionist attitudes towards food trade, but that is understandable given that more than 1 million people starved after WWII due to the fact that Japan had imported most of its staple foods at the time and got blockaded. There are actual laws that date from the end of WWII that enforce this protectionism, so it's hard to blame the current government :-) There are, of course, nationalist people in Japan (and even nationalist political parties), but they do not represent Japanese mainstream thinking in any way shape or form. It is very much the loony fringe.
- fenomas 8y agoAmusingly there's a pun here on "Zero-sum Era". This because "rei" is a common way to read the numeral zero, and "zero-wa" (using the same "wa" from the new era name) is the Japanese term for "zero-sum".
- w00kie 8y ago平成 (Heisei) commonly translated to "Achieving Peace" as stated in the article, can also be read as "Flat Growth" which is more indicative of the past two decades here :)
- ekianjo 8y agoNo, because nobody cares about the sound. The kanji matters. Soundwise there are tons of kanji with the exact same pronounciation so there is no pun to be found.
- jpatokal 8y agoThe joke is blowing up on Japanese Twitter, so yes, people do get the joke: https://twitter.com/groebner_basis/status/1112547757082832897?s=17 https://twitter.com/groebner_basis/status/111254775708283289...
- asutekku 8y agoMost of japanese puns literally lean on the fact some words sound the same or really similar.
- wodenokoto 8y agoYou are right that there are many homonyms in Japanese, but you are wrong in thinking that that results in nobody caring about them. Japan has a proud tradition of phonetic based puns, called dajare. Wikipedia has a surprisingly long list, which includes explanations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dajare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dajare
- Kurtz79 8y ago"ウランは売らん (uran wa uran) Translation: I never sell uranium. Explanation: ウラン (uran) means uranium, and the second 売らん (uran) means "never sell"." While in the West we have Uranus puns.
- quelltext 8y agoThis is weird. I thought this was an April Fool's joke. 冷戦 means cold war, so 令和 would mean cold peace. Not that this has an actual meaning but if we assign one it's not very positive, i.e. things will appear unpeaceful and there will be wars, but actually this is peace, in the background. Not that this is the meaning they chose, but I find it just a bit curious.
- hkmurakami 8y agoThose two homonym “Rei” characters do not mean the same thing. Reiwa is a newly conjured “word” that means roughly “declaration/ordinance of peace” https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/jn/233980/meaning/m0u/ https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/jn/233980/meaning/m0u/
- quelltext 8y agoYeah, I'm stupid.
- qlk1123 8y agoNot at all. Making mistakes is one of the best things when you learn a language. Kanjis can be complicated, but also fun. Cheers!
- comex 8y agoIf it makes you feel better, here's a (presumably) Japanese person making the same association: https://www.reddit.com/r/newsokur/comments/b7wf5k/令という漢字/ejuni4o/ https://www.reddit.com/r/newsokur/comments/b7wf5k/令という漢字/eju... Rough translation: "Somehow this kanji feels winter-like. I guess because of a strong sense of '冷'."
- glandium 8y ago令 and 冷 are different characters. They only have the same reading, from their common 音符 (onpu), 令. Other characters with the same onpu: 零, 玲, 怜, etc. All these characters have different meanings.
- ta1234512 8y agoI'm a chinese speaker, this new era name sounds kind of weird. When written in kanji, the previous nengos (meiji, taisho, showa, heisei) makes sense, and you can kind of tell the message it tries to convey. It just feels weird to me to concatenate "rei" and "wa" together.
- unsignedint 8y agoThis may be due to the fact that previous era names had its source in Chinese literature. Reiwa, on the other hand, comes from passage that appears in Manyoshu poetry collection.
- dr_dshiv 8y agoHarmony is an important concept in East and West -- and it has a much more specific meaning than "goodness." It played a major part in western philosophy (Pythagoras and Plato), where it was hypothesized that a mathematical harmony pervaded the cosmos. The first empirical -- even scientific -- hypothesis testing investigated this idea [0] using proportional lengths of string and the thickness of bronze chimes. Contemporaneously in China, both Confucianism and Daoism treated harmony as an underlying moral/aesthetic principle. The union of moral and aesthetic harmony was described in the thesis of Francis Hutchison, who was both Adam Smith's doctoral advisor and one of the biggest philosophical influences on the American founding fathers. See for yourself! [1] Harmony is not sameness -- it is diversity in unity. This is a key insight in both Eastern and Western philosophy. In the West, the connection to the mathematics of the harmonic series doesn't appear to be coincidental (harmonies consisting of notes that share harmonics) -- although I'd challenge anyone to make sense of it all! My point here is that there is a story worth learning more about. I'd argue that we need guiding philosophical principles -- and it is awfully nice that there is a scientific one that underpins some of the largest societies on Earth: * The official principal objective of the Chinese government is the creation of a "Harmonious Society". * The official motto of the EU is "In varietate concordia" * The traditional (although unofficial) motto of the USA is "e pluribus unum" * The official motto of Indonesia is "Unity in Diversity" * And now this from Japan! Not to say that these governments are necessarily aware of this history, but only that these ideas are very old, very core and very unifying. [0] Barker, A. (2007). The science of harmonics in classical Greece. Cambridge University Press. [1] Hutcheson, F., (1729). An inquiry into the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue: in two treatises. I. Concerning beauty, order, harmony, design. II. Concerning moral good and evil.
- rangibaby 8y agoDon’t forget that the Chinese character for harmony also represents “Japan”
- thaumasiotes 8y agoThe Chinese character for harmony is 和. The Japanese character 和 does represent Japan. The usual Chinese character that would represent Japan is 日; 和 is used in expressions taken from Japanese like 大和民族, the Japanese race.
- Grue3 8y agoI think the biggest problem is that if you type "reiwa" in an IME, 令和 wouldn't be shown as a suggestion because it wasn't a real word before. You'd have to write each character separately. Also speaking of Abe I saw a joke that you could see アベ in the era name if you look closely. http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/animanmatome/imgs/5/f/5fa3bffe-s.jpg http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/animanmatome/imgs/5/f/5fa3bffe-s....
- zhte415 8y agoWouldn't the IME remember it for next time? And IME updates include it? So at most type it explicitly as two characters once per IME/device?
- Freak_NL 8y agoYes, yes, and mostly yes. This is no different from entering a name of someone written with a less common combination of kanji. You can either enter the word phonetically and pick the kanji you want (this trains the IME), or manually add an IME dictionary entry. I fully expect all IME's in common use to have updates for this within days, if not already.
- glandium 8y agoI did have to input the characters one by one the first time. Not afterwards. IMEs are usually good at this game.
- readyp1 8y agoI'm pretty sure IME updates take care of it just fine... when I woke up this morning and tried out Microsoft's Japanese IME after finding out the new era name, れいわ became 令和 on the first try - no messing around with the "misconversion" data necessary. Despite that, Gboard's Japanese version hasn't caught up yet, but I imagine that'll be updated fairly quickly, either manually or OTA.
- ProxCoques 8y agoWhat'll you do when you get lonely, And nobody's waiting by your side? You've been running and hiding much too long. You know it's just your foolish pride. Reiwa, you've got me on my knees. Reiwa, I'm begging, darling please.