4 ms·

It's a really complicated issue, because whether the character is different or not is debatable. In English writing, we consider a serif A to be the same chara

It's a really complicated issue, because whether the character is different or not is debatable. In English writing, we consider a serif A to be the same character as a sans-serif A, even though the glyph is obviously different, and neither do we distinguish between a "French" A and a "German" A. So what do we do with 国 and 國? The first of those is always used in simplified Chinese and usually in Japanese, while the second is used in traditional Chinese and sometimes in Japanese (eg. names). Is this one, two or three characters? More on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
It’s worth noting this kind of distinction did used to exist in the Latin alphabet as well. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, German letters were different, as part of a debate about whether German text should be written in blackletter or Latin/Antiqua/what-other-Europeans-use script.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  We still have these issues in e.g. Hebrew and Yiddish, Arabic and Persian, and tons of adapted Cyrillic scripts from ex-Soviet states. Not to mention Northern-European accented vowels, and cedilla letters such as Ç. I'm personally of the belief that the accented and cedilla characters should be exclusively stored as combining character pairs, even if modern keyboard mappings require only a single keypress. My own language stores every character as two bytes (at a minimum), so the storage aspect is a solved problem.
afiori 5y ago
as an armchair linguist it is clearly two (not one, not three) distinct "characters", by going how I am guessing native speakers think about them. If all three had different codepoints and you replaced 国 with 國 a lot of people would realize, less so if you replaced 國 with 國. To my understanding the only argument in favour for han unification was that it would have taken-up a lot of codepoints otherwise.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  > by going how I am guessing native speakers think about them. I can assure you that Han unification happened at the hand of native speakers.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

It’s worth noting this kind of distinction did used to exist in the Latin alphabet as well. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, German letters were different, as part of a debate about whether German text should be written in blackletter or Latin/Antiqua/what-other-Europeans-use script.

dotancohen 5y ago
We still have these issues in e.g. Hebrew and Yiddish, Arabic and Persian, and tons of adapted Cyrillic scripts from ex-Soviet states. Not to mention Northern-European accented vowels, and cedilla letters such as Ç. I'm personally of the belief that the accented and cedilla characters should be exclusively stored as combining character pairs, even if modern keyboard mappings require only a single keypress. My own language stores every character as two bytes (at a minimum), so the storage aspect is a solved problem.

afiori 5y ago

as an armchair linguist it is clearly two (not one, not three) distinct "characters", by going how I am guessing native speakers think about them. If all three had different codepoints and you replaced 国 with 國 a lot of people would realize, less so if you replaced 國 with 國. To my understanding the only argument in favour for han unification was that it would have taken-up a lot of codepoints otherwise.

wodenokoto 5y ago
> by going how I am guessing native speakers think about them. I can assure you that Han unification happened at the hand of native speakers.