Timeline for How to find alternative writings of a kanji in electronic form?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:43 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://japanese.stackexchange.com/ with https://japanese.stackexchange.com/
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| Dec 13, 2015 at 16:40 | comment | added | kjo | ShenKuo: on this point we definitely differ; different isn't necessarily "wrong", as in "evil", but different can easily be impractical. Take another example: the Roman number system, is not just different: it is insanely impractical. Yes, it was used by one of the most successful empires in the West, and it outlived that empire for several centuries. Still, none of this can hide its hideous impracticality (learning to carry out basic arithmetic operations with it took years; try to compute XXXVII times LXXIX without first converting it to arabic numerals). I'm glad we ditched it. | |
| Dec 13, 2015 at 16:31 | comment | added | sqrtbottle | @kjo, East Asia communicated for 2500 years over linguistic barriers because of Chinese characters, and often still do (ever heard of 筆談?), and they do hold semantic information that phonetic alphabets don't. They're not meritless, and rather than saying their impractical, they're just different. Besides, there's virtually no evidence showing that writing system has any measurable impact on ecomonic output, or else Korea and Turkey would be rolling in money, America would be broke, and Taiwan would be poorer than the mainland. Just remember, different isn't wrong ; ) | |
| Dec 13, 2015 at 16:06 | comment | added | kjo | Thanks again. Your last 3 comments answer my question. I'll be happy to accept this as an answer if you care to re-post it as such. BTW, I love kanji, I think they're beautiful, almost magical. I have to admit, though, from the point of view of sheer practicality, I find it difficult to defend a writing system based on ideographs. I can only wonder how much more productive the Chinese and Japanese economies would be if they had a more practical writing system... | |
| Dec 13, 2015 at 15:59 | comment | added | sqrtbottle | the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary, but even then more variants have arisen since then. It's an ever ongoing process of character evolution and creation. The standard characters are fixed, though. The joyo kanji + jinmei kanji lists give all the kanji you're expected to know in Japanese, published and sometimes slightly updated by the Japanese gov, but EVEN THEN there are characters like 飴 that aren't on the list that most people use anyway...you can't really win. tl;dr, it's not possible to find a 100% comprehensive resource, but wiktionary gets damn close for digital forms | |
| Dec 13, 2015 at 15:56 | comment | added | sqrtbottle | and then you get variations like ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B2%E3%83%90%E5%AD%97 that are literally just Chinese characters adopted into Japanese. Throw in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryakuji to that, and you've got a big soup but no complete answers. Wiktionary has them all (or 99.9% of characters and variants), but not on one page, and you'll have to look up each character individually to find its alternative forms. Other than doing a quad-lingual cross reference of all CJKV languages, it's not possible to assemble a complete list of variants. Some old books do a decent (cont) | |
| Dec 13, 2015 at 15:52 | comment | added | sqrtbottle | If you're looking for alternative character forms, you can find some at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification. There are also some variant character forms that come from different simplifications like ゲバ字, which will replace 戦争 with 战争, for instance. The only place I know that actually lists every character variant is wiktionary, and you'd have to go through each character turn by turn. The issue being that actually looking for variants is impossible due to the stylistic variations in written writing. Some people will write Shinjitai, others will use traditional in calligraphy (cont) | |
| Dec 13, 2015 at 15:47 | comment | added | kjo | Thanks. Your answer is very helpful and informative. In fact I had initially accepted it, but then I realized that it really did not address my main question; instead, it explained the observations I had described in an example. (In fact, after reading your answer I realized that my example could only add confusion, so I'm thinking of either eliminating it, or changing it radically.) Since I still would like an answer to my original question, I decided to "unaccept" your answer (I still kept my upvote of it). I hope this is not terrible form. | |
| Dec 13, 2015 at 15:12 | comment | added | sqrtbottle | I took it out of the answer for obvious reasons, but I encourage everyone to support this proposal on meta, which means we don't need to use images every time to deal with this type of question, and we can properly differentiate between Chinese and Japanese. Right now it's a discredit to us as a Q&A site that we can't display all Japanese writing on a site about the Japanese language. (meta.stackexchange.com/questions/251743/…) | |
| Dec 13, 2015 at 15:09 | vote | accept | kjo | ||
| Dec 13, 2015 at 15:41 | |||||
| Dec 13, 2015 at 15:09 | vote | accept | kjo | ||
| Dec 13, 2015 at 15:09 | |||||
| Dec 13, 2015 at 15:08 | history | answered | sqrtbottle | CC BY-SA 3.0 |