Comments on: strawberry in Kanji?

strawberry in Kanji?

delmoi — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 07:31:01 -0800

A history of computer character sets in Japan JIS X 0208 (originally JIS C 6226) of 1978 was the first JIS character set to include kanji. It specified 6,335 kanji, arranged by frequency into two levels ... Many bizarre mistakes were made in transcribing names, resulting in several new kanji coming into existance.

By: Jase_B

Jase_B — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 08:01:12 -0800

I knew there was a lot of history behind it all but didn't actually know what it was. Thanks. Since this liberalization, hundreds of new name kanji have been suggested ('strawberry' seems to be a common one). I hope they bring out official kanji for all the rediculous katakanaised foreign loan words that are absolutely everywhere. They, IMO, cause the most headaches when trying to read Japanese.

By: orthogonality

orthogonality — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 08:01:59 -0800

Fascinating example of how many levels of indirection arises to describe what initially seems a simple problem.

Unicode was generally built on the following paradigm. One Character has many Glyphs However, for Han characters it is often better to think of it this way: One Character has one or more Variants, which have many Glyphs

By: Floach

Floach — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 08:39:10 -0800

This kind of esoteric techno-ridiculosity makes me very happy. Thanks.

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 08:41:41 -0800

I don't know much about Japanese, or character sets, or unicode. But this was fascinating. Thanks.

By: bobo123

bobo123 — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:32:45 -0800

Yeah I've been spending hours lately trying to organize my mp3s, a lot of which are encoded with Shift-JIS. I've been using this program mp3tag to "convert codepage" which makes the tags readable in Media Player, Tag & Rename, and Quintessential, but not Winamp or Foobar2000. I'm not even sure what format my mp3 tags are now, if it's UTF-8 or UTF-16 or some mix. Anyway the post is informative to why everyone doesn't just use Unicode.

By: 3.2.3

3.2.3 — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:37:55 -0800

oh man, this is great. thanks. i have several shift-jis keyboards for testing various things. now this gives me something to point people at and say go read, instead of trying to endless explain this crap.

By: adamrice

adamrice — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:43:30 -0800

People who are into this sort of thing may want to download the cjk.inf file created by Ken Lunde. Ken is the authority on Asian script encodings. If you're really into it, buy his book "Understanding CJKV information processing."

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 11:29:14 -0800

"V" for Vietnamese, adamrice? I thought Vietnamese was written in the Roman alphabet nowadays, albeit with loads of diacritics. Or does the "V" stand for something else? (Not quibbling, just curious. This is neat stuff.)

By: adamrice

adamrice — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 11:44:39 -0800

Yes, V for Vietnamese--it's true that it is written in the Roman alphabet now, but it used to be written in Chinese characters.

By: A dead Quaker

A dead Quaker — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 16:01:08 -0800

Thanks for posting this, I've been dealing with Japanese encoding issues at work lately. Much more informative than staring at character sets over at unicode.org.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 08:42:02 -0800

Wow, great stuff! (I missed this originally, and was directed to it by No-sword.) I have one question. This sentence has been cut off at a crucial point: These [hentaigana] are absent from Unicode (and it would be very complicated to add them), but even if they were present there would still be Anybody know (or have an educated guess) how that should go on from there?

By: adamrice

adamrice — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:32:08 -0800

LH--Why don't you e-mail the author? My guess is that he might have meant "difficulties in processing hentaigana input" or possibly "a strong case that modern Japanese can be fully represented in Unicode" (I've been translating Japanese since '89, and only learned of the existence of hentaigana this year, doing a little exploring into the history of Japanese orthography).

By: languagehat

languagehat — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 16:48:02 -0800

Good idea. I thought at first that the author was hiding (no byline), but now I notice the "e-mail me" bit.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 19:19:14 -0800

'Hentaigana' sounds rather perverted... :P