Han Unification is something that should have been more nuanced, and I'll be quite surprised of it at least a few linguists didn't give a nuanced answer and hav

Han Unification is something that should have been more nuanced, and I'll be quite surprised of it at least a few linguists didn't give a nuanced answer and have been ignored. 1. Let's start with a simple character (indeed the character for character) like 字. The top stroke on this character is generally written straight in Japanese (and I believe Korean), but it has a very distinct diagonal angle (top left to bottom right) in Chinese, both Traditional and Simplified. Should it be counted as the same character? I believe most linguists would say yes. If your answer for this is no, then Han Unification is a lost cause - you'd basically have to create completely separate character sets for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese, and add a few extra characters to the Traditional Chinese set that are different over in Hong Kong. 2. Let's go further on with the grass radical (艹) which has 4 strokes in Traditional Chinese vs. 3 in other writing systems. Should all the characters with this radical be separate? 3. What about characters like 骨? The inner right angle stroke in the top of this character is on the left side in Simplified Chinese, and on the right side otherwise. Similar minor differences can be found for characters like 刃 and 化. These are not really the fault of simplification, but rather come from the fact that different countries chose a different Han character variant to standardize on. A good example from another non-western language that went through a partial unification ignoring stylistic differences in writing would be Urdu. It's sharing the same unicode range as Arabic, even though the typical styling of "the same characters" in both languages could be quite different. Here's a signboard with both Urdu and Arabic from Wikipedia - the difference is quite apparent: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/UAE_signboard.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/UAE_sign... But the unification could never be perfect. Simplified characters often combine more than 1 traditional characters. e.g. 发 could mean both hair (髮) and discharge (發). Japanese simplified the later character to 発. Unicode assigns a different codepoint to each of them, and it would obviously be quite bad for Traditional Chinese if it didn't. It also assigns a different code point where consistent stylistic simplification of radicals are involved, so all characters with the radical 見 ('see') have different codepoints from those with the simplified radical 见. Even ignoring political tensions, Han unification was naive from the start, especially considering they knew they wouldn't be able to unify everything. They could have left a way to designate regional styling within the encoding.