4 ms·

> In practice this doesn't happen that often The primary reason that this doesn't happen that often is that neither Chinese nor Japanese use Chinese characters

> In practice this doesn't happen that often The primary reason that this doesn't happen that often is that neither Chinese nor Japanese use Chinese characters in a primarily pictographic manner anymore. Only a small subset of the characters are pictographic (and even they are only vaguely so), and unlike in the distant past, most words are actually compositions of several characters, so new words can be represented via either combinations of existing characters if applicable, or via borrowing existing characters for their pronunciation (or in the case of Japanese, using the syllabic characters).

anigbrowl 3y ago
most words are actually compositions of several characters For that matter most characters are combinations of other ones. Briefly, there are 27 different stroke shapes and 214 different 'radicals' in kanji that are recombined in various ways to form new characters. Japanese kanji overlap heavily with Chinese Kangxi, but they're gone in somewhat different directions over the last few centuries. (I'm interested in both languages but less familiar with Chinese than Japanese because I can't speak the former at all.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_stroke_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_stro... I'm not a linguist, but I don't think you can understand languages that use Chinese characters if you're not willing to look at the components those characters are built out of. I mean, you could just learn them by sight and remember the ~2000 most common ones, but that seems like both a more shallow and difficult approach. Anyway, a lot of the more obscure characters are not displayed properly on most web pages like the Wikipedia example above because they're in one of the CJK extension tables, and this seems like a problem, because few people are going to want to dig through the unicode charts to find them. This isn't a problem with unicode as such, but with the way browsers and operating systems implement it. https://unicode.org/charts/ https://unicode.org/charts/
- Macha 3y ago
  You couldn't simply do an encoding that generates kanji procedurally from the list of component radicals because of the differing placements, and sometimes significant modifications of the radicals to fit in the kanji. Take the kanji 勉 which is made up of the radicals 免 and 力. You could maybe have a "right half" slot for the 力 radical which would figure out the stretching but the fact that the leg of 免 extends underneath it is something that only exists for that kanji and then you'll need to special case it.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    I probably couldn't do it, and while I might have the skills in future it would probably be a fool's errand to build a system for that just to demonstrate that it could. But I don't see any fundamental barrier to the idea; it's a comprehensible system, after all. Maybe I'll sic an LLM on it when I'm feeling less conscious of heat loads.

anigbrowl 3y ago

most words are actually compositions of several characters For that matter most characters are combinations of other ones. Briefly, there are 27 different stroke shapes and 214 different 'radicals' in kanji that are recombined in various ways to form new characters. Japanese kanji overlap heavily with Chinese Kangxi, but they're gone in somewhat different directions over the last few centuries. (I'm interested in both languages but less familiar with Chinese than Japanese because I can't speak the former at all.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_stroke_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_stro... I'm not a linguist, but I don't think you can understand languages that use Chinese characters if you're not willing to look at the components those characters are built out of. I mean, you could just learn them by sight and remember the ~2000 most common ones, but that seems like both a more shallow and difficult approach. Anyway, a lot of the more obscure characters are not displayed properly on most web pages like the Wikipedia example above because they're in one of the CJK extension tables, and this seems like a problem, because few people are going to want to dig through the unicode charts to find them. This isn't a problem with unicode as such, but with the way browsers and operating systems implement it. https://unicode.org/charts/ https://unicode.org/charts/

Macha 3y ago
You couldn't simply do an encoding that generates kanji procedurally from the list of component radicals because of the differing placements, and sometimes significant modifications of the radicals to fit in the kanji. Take the kanji 勉 which is made up of the radicals 免 and 力. You could maybe have a "right half" slot for the 力 radical which would figure out the stretching but the fact that the leg of 免 extends underneath it is something that only exists for that kanji and then you'll need to special case it.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  I probably couldn't do it, and while I might have the skills in future it would probably be a fool's errand to build a system for that just to demonstrate that it could. But I don't see any fundamental barrier to the idea; it's a comprehensible system, after all. Maybe I'll sic an LLM on it when I'm feeling less conscious of heat loads.