> 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

> 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