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Yes. As far as I understood it, the result was an incoherent mess. I think some characters got different code points, while others were merged. And apparently
by hnfong 2mo ago
Yes. As far as I understood it, the result was an incoherent mess.
I think some characters got different code points, while others were merged. And apparently the Japanese complained bitterly over the ones that were merged. If you had read any articles about that, this is probably what you have in mind right now.
And I'm also a bit tilted by the ones that had different code points, because when processing CJK text now we have to deal with characters that are (in my native Cantonese) essentially the same, looks similar (to my undiscriminating eyes), yet having different code points so that things like text search sometimes don't work.
Of course I'm not "blaming" the Japanese, if anything the simplified vs traditional Chinese thing is much more of a practical problem, and the conflicting code points I deal with on a routine basis are more of a Hong Kong vs Taiwan thing, but I was told that the Unified CJK thing adopted a different "philosophy" from the rest of Unicode (which I think really is some kind of Aristotelian essentialism...) mostly due to vocal objections from the Japanese.
- pamcake 2mo ago> I was told that the Unified CJK thing adopted a different "philosophy" from the rest of Unicode What would that philosophy be about? Sounds apocryphal. Unicode has never done "unification" like that for other languages/scripts? i/ı/i, ö/ø/ø̈/oͤ: Same same, different codepoints. Search and sorting is a mess everywhere. Depending on your locale, ö sorts either after o or after z. Sometimes it's semantically and phonetically equivalent to o wrt search but moreoften not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96
- yorwba 2mo agoWell, Unicode didn't unify 門/门 either, but the appearance of the second glyph changes a lot depending on whether you use a Chinese font or a Japanese one. Meanwhile they did unify all the graphical variants of Latin characters with identical semantics, it's just that everyone is so used to the result that you hardly notice not being able to control whether g has a hook or a looped tail, and nobody expects to copy some German blackletter text into a French document and have it show up visually distinct, without explicitly setting the font.
- Joker_vD 2mo agoYes, and Cyrillic letters also look quite different in Bulgarian and Russian fonts. So what?
- asveikau 2mo agoIs that true? Other than things like not seeing a Ы, Э or Ё in Bulgarian, the modern printed fonts look the same to me, though I am not from either country.
- knuckleheadsmif 2mo agoI was involved in this before Unicode be a e Unicode when it started as discussions with Xerox and Apple—Xerox at that time had their XCCS standard. Those discussions directly morphed into Unicode. [[I was even there when we picked the name Unicode for what we had home to produce.]] Conceptually we long debated unifying everything and in an ideal perfect world we would have done it. The reason was one primary goal for a new standard was to make it easily parseable and having unique rather than repeated codes was key to that. Sadly in the end we did not unify everything only to get buy-in from all major countries to support. That’s even why you see the roman/asciii characters repeated within Unicode itself—like as romaji. This was all well in good until we came to CJK and the number characters with semantical overlap was huge that this was more seriously considered—infact we started investigating this at Xerox before even thinking about Unicode and that work predated and influenced and leveraged the work done later.
- wodenokoto 2mo agoSame thing, different code points is the opposite of han unification. Han unification is same code point, different thing.
- numpad0 2mo agoUnicode merges some Chinese and Japanese characters into same code points and leave others as they are, on random per-character basis. So Chinese guys gets a ton of Japanese mixed texts and it causes tons of problems. Japanese users are angry when system chooses Chinese fonts over Japanese, Chinese users apparently suffer with a font mishmash of Chinese and Japanese all the time like a mid-word capitalization. The official sanctioned solution is to just commit a genocide and nuke the offending language out of the system or to attach IVS to every Japanese characters which is like zero padding every single characters by a byte or two. It's really putting everyone in pain and making absolutely no one happy, which sounds like what a good compromise tends to be, but LLMs seem to be struggling with there being multiple completely separate language families sharing codepoints but not character shapes or syntax. I've seen a smaller LLM model use made up verbs spilling over from the other language. I believe ML guys don't like datasets that do that kind of things. Same apply to image models.
- wl 2mo agoUnicode has done the same unification for cuneiform languages. If you’re dealing with texts in Hittite, Sumerian, or Akkadian, you need to make sure you’re using the right fonts, otherwise the text will look entirely wrong.
- wodenokoto 2mo agoHan-unification was the result of Asian scholars, in particular the Ideaographic Research Group [1] I have no idea what "Aristotelian essentialism" is supposed to mean, or if you are saying that the unification was that. > And apparently the Japanese complained bitterly over the ones that were merged. and > but I was told that the Unified CJK thing adopted a different "philosophy" from the rest of Unicode [...] mostly due to vocal objections from the Japanese. Seems to contradict each other. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic_Research_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic_Research_Group
- hnfong 2mo agoSorry, probably not very standard terminology. I somehow picked it up from the OReilly book: Fonts & Encodings: From Advanced Typography to Unicode and Everything in Between Page 55: """ there are characters with no glyphs. glyphs that can correspond to a number of different characters according to context. Glyphs that correspond to multiple characters at the same time (with weightings assigned to each), and even more possibilities. The problem of glyphs and characters is so complex that it has gone beyond the realm of computer specialists and has come to be of interest even to philosophers. For example, the Japanese philosopher Shigeki Moro, who has worked with ideographic characters in Buddhist documents, goes so far in his article Surface or Essence: Beyond Character Model Set [274] as to say that Unicode's approach is Aristotelian essentialist and to recommend supplanting it by an approach inspired by Jacques Derrida's theory of writing [114, 115]. The reader interested in the philosophical aspects of the issue is invited to consult [165,156], in addition to the works cited above. """ I think "essentialist" is probably a good description of the philosophy of how Unicode defines characters as opposed to fonts and glyphs, so I adopted it.
- podocarp 2mo agoAre there examples of characters with no glyphs and glyphs with multiple characters? Does it mean there is a motion of a certain word but nobody knows how to write it or there are multiple ways to write it? When going from traditional to simplified Chinese many words with different meanings were merged which is kinda weird. Like sprout 發 and hair 髮 now being a single word 发. Is that what its trying to say?
- panzi 2mo agoInteresting. I guess there are no well working normalization functions as there are for the different code points that can make umlauts (äöü)?
- numpad0 2mo agoI don't know but last I glanced at it, the Unification was implied to be coming from Chinese pressure than Japanese. Each of Kanji/Hanzi countries already had each own acceptable common use character sets and those could have been just populated into each own spaces. That seemed like the original plan at some point. There has to be a reason why it happened(as to why Unicode suddenly started insisting it has to fit inside a 2^16 total chars or whatever).
- charcircuit 2mo ago>having different code points so that things like text search sometimes don't work. Cross language search seems like a hack to me. Searching in Chinese should find Chinese words and searching in Japanese should find Japanese words. Being able to search in Japanese and get Chinese results is not what most users want, unless they don't have a proper keyboard.
- geokon 2mo agoDo you feel similarly about french and english? It could work but would be a little weird and annoyong to switch language modes I think you underestimate the similarities. For instance Japanese names are not translated to Chinese. Theyre just read with Chinese pronunciations. So Chinese will regularly interact with Japanese content (im guess it happens the other way around too, but i dont have the personal experience)
- charcircuit 2mo ago>Do you feel similarly about french and english? Yes. If you search gâteau it shouldn't show results for cake by default. >Japanese names are not translated to Chinese Then it makes sense to search for the names in Japanese. Either they are translated to Chinese so you should be able to search with Chinese, or they aren't and you should search with Japanese.
- geokon 2mo ago> Either they are translated to Chinese so you should be able to search with Chinese, or they aren't and you should search with Japanese. The point is that when they look identical most of the time, you have no idea which language "mode" the text is in. Tokyo is 東京 in both languages. They're not visually distinguishable. Maybe in a long list some particular characters are written slightly differently, but you'd have to really inspect the list and hope that distinguishing characters show up. From the outside this may look weird, but to people that are around Chinese characters having multiple ways to write a character is just a normal fact of life. They look different in classical writing, seal scripts and cursive scripts. Trades people will also use shorthands. You have analogous situations with Simplified and Traditional Character - where some characters are simplified to fewer strokes and others are not. But as a reader you don't really care if it's 吃/喫 or 臺灣/台灣/台湾. There is basically no situation where you want to find 吃 but not 喫. I get the desire to preserve native Japanese forms of the Chinese characters. But that seems like something mostly resolved with a font If you want to mix Chinese and Japanese characters, then you are left having to mix fonts - which is a bit ugly I guess. It's not the most ergonomic solution, but this is the edge case. Most of the time you want different forms to search the same. If you search 臺灣 and your word processor skipped 台灣, then you'd be rightfully annoyed.
- throwaway2037 2mo ago> As far as I understood it, the result was an incoherent mess. Do you have any specific examples? I never heard this before.