Hacker News

An Introduction to Writing Systems and Unicode

29 points by mariuz ago | 5 comments

ks2048 |next [-]

This site has been a gem for a long time for Unicode and language-related topics. Just as good to link to the top-level,

https://r12a.github.io/

mostafah |root |parent [-]

Richard is amazing. I briefly worked with him while volunteering on a W3C text layout requirements document. He cares deeply about writing systems, and he has been doing so much valuable work in this space.

ovciokko |previous [-]

The texts in the images claimed to be Simplified Chinese are not really conforming the standard glyph shapes of hanzi as defined by the government of China; they look more like the Japanese standard shapes of kanji.

mbrubeck |root |parent |next [-]

Can you specify which characters you are talking about? I don't see any examples of Japanese-specific kanji in the Chinese images.

For example, the first image uses 沟 and 时 forms that are found only in simplified Chinese. In both Japanese and traditional Chinese, these are written 溝 and 時.

The images also correctly use traditional/simplified Chinese forms of 統/统. The Japanese shinjitai form [0] does not match either of them.

请 as shown in the image is similarly used only in simplified Chinese, not Japanese. (In Japanese, the traditional Chinese form is normally used in handwriting, and an alternate form of the 訁 radical is often used in printed text.)

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B5%B1#Japanese

dhosek |root |parent |previous [-]

One of the big complaints about Han-unification in Unicode is that simplified and traditional forms share the same code points so display of simplified vs traditional is up to the font to manage.