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Does this come from actual experience trying to communicate in chinese or japanese? At least for chinese (but I'm pretty sure it applies to japanese too), what
by hfhdjdks 3y ago
Does this come from actual experience trying to communicate in chinese or japanese? At least for chinese (but I'm pretty sure it applies to japanese too), what you're saying doesn't ring as relevant (i.e. it is true that some characters don't have a graphic representation in many fonts, but it doesn't cause problems for communication / creation of new words)
Plenty of fonts can represent a vast amount of characters (search around, but even free fonts can have >50k), much more than even highly literate people could ever use (a very educated person might know 8k characters, but would use much less actively).
Every new release of Unicode releases new characters that are slowly incorporated into fonts...but for many years these are on the truly long tail of characters, nothing that any common person would use. There might be a few exceptions with new characters (the new japanese emperor characters comes to mind), but the thing to bear in mind is that new words don't necessarily involve new characters. A big chunk of nouns in chinese are composed of multiple characters, so making a new combination can generate a new word (电视 is television...electric + vision). This is probably even easier in japanese were they can use katakana to spell an English word and create a new japanese word.
- earthboundkid 3y agoYes. Han Unification is something people read about online and decide is bad or whatever, but it actually isn’t relevant to using Japanese with computers. People use Shift-JIS and fax machines because legacy technology takes a long time to die everywhere and longer in Japan. It’s not more complicated than that.
- numpad0 3y agoThis is correct: as much as it's wrong, Han Unification isn't a problem so long you stick to one language to support and remove all conflicting fonts for the other two locales, which are rarely needed anyway in Asia, it just comes back when you try to support multiple CJK languages at the same time. Unicode coverage of each languages are totally fine for 99% of use cases, the Unification problem is just it's reusing the same address space for all CJK languages.
- johnwalkr 3y agoThe problem is probably less prevalent in Japanese. There's like 10x less kanji than hanzi, and only 2-3k are normally used. Also faxes in Japan are generally sent using printed documents, so handwriting a very rare character doesn't explain the usage of faxes.