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Let's look at a specific example then of why sharing codepoints between languages is so silly. Let's talk about 直. Is that a japanese character? A chinese one?

Let's look at a specific example then of why sharing codepoints between languages is so silly. Let's talk about 直. Is that a japanese character? A chinese one? Well, let's look it up in a japanese dictionary [0] and then a chinese one [1]. You should see that the results look different. They're two different characters drawn in two different ways. However, in this hacker news comment, there's no way for me to indicate to use one font for one, and one font for the other. I can't say "The japanese glyph 直 is the same unicode codepoint as the chinese glyph 直 even though they render differently. They were unified". I can't make them render correctly as japanese and chinese respectively. For my computer, it _only_ renders in the chinese variant (without the extra stroke on the left) on hacker news. Like most sites, there's no way to indicate in the text input which language that portion of my text is. Unlike with every western script, if I don't indicate the language correctly, it will be actively rendered wrong and difficult for a reader to understand. To draw an analogy from another hacker news comment, this would be like the unicode consortium saying that 'colour' always renders as 'color', and you just have to switch fonts for it to look like 'colour' [3]. Okay, so that's why unifying things at all is silly and causes trouble. As for characters that were unified out of existence: unfortunately, examples of those are hard to give. There are various names that have stylistic choices or use unusual characters which can no longer be rendered "correctly". Arguably, that could be seen as akin to the fact that if you style your name calligraphically in the western world, unicode doesn't help you replicate that flair. [0]: https://jisho.org/search/%E7%9B%B4%20%23kanji https://jisho.org/search/%E7%9B%B4%20%23kanji [1]: https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb=%E7%9B%B4 https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8041288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8041288

microcolonel 6y ago
> However, in this hacker news comment, there's no way for me to indicate to use one font for one, and one font for the other. Sure you can, the Chinese one is 直 and the Japanese one is 直. They are still the same character though, and it's meant the same thing the whole time. The Japanese got it earlier, so they form it in a way that would be recognizable to the scribes of the Zhou dynasty, and possibly the Shang dynasty. [0] Part of how you can “tell” it's the same character, is that the cousin variations are all used in precisely the same way. Many compounds formed with it are shared directly between Japanese and Chinese. [1] [2] [3] It's related right down to in some compounds being interchangeable with 只, the latter being a less dated form of it (i.e. 直中 vs. 只中 in Japanese). And beyond all of this, compounds shared between languages have been written in both orthographies and meant precisely the same thing for a very long time. I think considering these variations to be separate characters makes about as much sense as considering the s in “stop” to be different in French because it's pronounced slightly differently, and because French penmanship is different from British/American penmanship (i.e. sometimes French people lift the pen while forming a lowercase s [IIRC]). [0]: http://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/yanbian?char=直 http://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/yanbian?char=直 [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/直言 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/直言 [2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/是非曲直 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/是非曲直 [3]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/強直性脊椎炎 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/強直性脊椎炎

microcolonel 6y ago

> However, in this hacker news comment, there's no way for me to indicate to use one font for one, and one font for the other. Sure you can, the Chinese one is 直 and the Japanese one is 直. They are still the same character though, and it's meant the same thing the whole time. The Japanese got it earlier, so they form it in a way that would be recognizable to the scribes of the Zhou dynasty, and possibly the Shang dynasty. [0] Part of how you can “tell” it's the same character, is that the cousin variations are all used in precisely the same way. Many compounds formed with it are shared directly between Japanese and Chinese. [1] [2] [3] It's related right down to in some compounds being interchangeable with 只, the latter being a less dated form of it (i.e. 直中 vs. 只中 in Japanese). And beyond all of this, compounds shared between languages have been written in both orthographies and meant precisely the same thing for a very long time. I think considering these variations to be separate characters makes about as much sense as considering the s in “stop” to be different in French because it's pronounced slightly differently, and because French penmanship is different from British/American penmanship (i.e. sometimes French people lift the pen while forming a lowercase s [IIRC]). [0]: http://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/yanbian?char=直 http://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/yanbian?char=直 [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/直言 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/直言 [2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/是非曲直 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/是非曲直 [3]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/強直性脊椎炎 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/強直性脊椎炎