CJK Unified Ideographs
The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background. In the process called Han unification the common (shared) characters were identified, and named "CJK Unified Ideographs". As of version 6.1, Unicode defines a total of 74,617 CJK Unified Ideographs.[1]
The terms ideographs or ideograms may be misleading, since the Chinese script is not strictly a picture writing system.
Historically, the Vietnamese writing system Chữ Nôm uses Chinese ideographs too, so sometimes the abbreviation "CJKV" is used. Since the 16th century, an extended Latin alphabet has been used in Vietnam.
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[edit] CJK Unified Ideographs blocks
[edit] CJK Unified Ideographs
The basic block named CJK Unified Ideographs (4E00-9FFF) contains 20,941 basic Chinese characters, not only those used in the Chinese writing system but also the Kanji used in the Japanese writing system and the Hanja, whose use is diminishing in Korea. Many characters in this block are used in all three writing systems, while others are in only one or two of the three. Chinese characters were also used in the Vietnamese Chữ nôm script (now obsolete). The first 20,902 characters in the block are arranged according to the Kangxi Dictionary ordering of radicals. In this system the characters written with the fewest strokes are listed first. The remaining characters were added later, and so are not in radical sequence.
The block is the result of Han unification[2], which was somewhat controversial in the Far East.[3] Since Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters were coded in the same location, the appearance of a selected glyph could depend on the particular font being used. However, the source separation rule states that characters encoded separately in an earlier character set would remain separate in the new Unicode encoding.[4]
Using variation selectors[5] it is possible to specify certain variant CJK ideograms within Unicode. The Adobe-Japan1 character set proposal, which actually calls for 14,658 ideographic variation sequences,[5] is an extreme example of the use of variation selectors.[6]
[edit] Charts
4E00-62FF, 6300-77FF, 7800-8CFF, 8D00-9FFF.
[edit] Sources
The code points in this block are assigned under Source Separation Rule.
- China
| Code | Standard | Character count | note |
|---|---|---|---|
| G0 | GB 2312-80 | 6763 | |
| G1 | GB 12345-90 | 2352 | |
| G3 | GB 7589-87 unsimplified form | 7237 | |
| G5 | GB 7590-87 unsimplified form | 7039 | |
| G7 | Modern Chinese general character chart | 642 | |
| G8 | GB 8565-89 | 290 |
- Taiwan
| Code | Standard | Character count | note |
|---|---|---|---|
| T1 | CNS 11643-1986 plane 1 | 5401+9 | |
| T2 | CNS 11643-1986 plane 2 | 7650 | |
| TE | CNS 11643-1986 plane 14 | 6319+239+10 | 239 from CCIII, 10 from XCCS |
- Japan
| Code | Standard | Character count | note |
|---|---|---|---|
| J0 | JIS X 0208-90 | 6335+1 | |
| J1 | JIS X 0212-90 | 5801 |
- South Korea
| Code | Standard | Character count | note |
|---|---|---|---|
| K0 | KS C 5601-87 | 4888 | includes 268 duplicates |
| K1 | KS C 5657-91 | 2856 |
- Others
- ANSI Z39.64-1989
- Big5
- CCCII plane 1
- GB 12052-89
- JEF
- Chinese telegraph code
- Taiwan telegraph code
- Xerox Chinese
In Unicode 4.1, 14 HKSCS-2004 characters and 8 GB 18030 characters were assigned to between U+9FA6 and U+9FBB code points.
[edit] CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A
Extension A, located in block 3400-4DBF, contains characters which are more commonly used.
[edit] Charts
[edit] Sources
- China
| Code | Standard |
|---|---|
| GE | GB 16500-95 |
| GS | Singapore CJK ideographs |
- Taiwan
| Code | Standard | note |
|---|---|---|
| T3 | CNS 11643-1992 plane 3 | |
| T4 | CNS 11643-1992 plane 4 | |
| T5 | CNS 11643-1992 plane 5 | |
| T6 | CNS 11643-1992 plane 6 | |
| T7 | CNS 11643-1992 plane 7 | |
| TF | CNS 11643-1992 plane 15 |
- Japan
| Code | Standard | note |
|---|---|---|
| JA | Unified Japanese IT Vendors Contemporary Ideographs, 1993 |
- South Korea
| Code | Standard | note |
|---|---|---|
| K2 | PKS C 5700-1:1994 | |
| K3 | PKS C 5700-2:1994 |
- Vietnam
| Code | Standard | note |
|---|---|---|
| V0 | TCVN 5773:1993 | |
| V1 | TCVN 6056:1995 |
[edit] CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B
Extension B, in block 20000-2A6DF, comprises 42,711 characters that were added in Unicode 3.1 (2001). These include most of the characters used in the Kangxi Dictionary that are not in the basic CJK Unified Ideographs block, as well as many Chữ Nôm characters that were historically used for writing the Vietnamese language.
[edit] Charts
20000-215FF, 21600-230FF, 23100-245FF, 24600-260FF, 26100-275FF, 27600-290FF, 29100-2A6DF.
[edit] Sources
- Kangxi dictionary
- Hanyu character dictionary
- Ciyuan
- Cihai
- Hanyu word dictionary
- Encyclopedia of China
- Beijing University Founder DTP
- Siku Quanshu
- HKSCS
- JIS X 0213 planes 3 and 4
- PKS 5700-3:1998
- KPS 9566-97, KPS 10721-2000
- CNS 11643 planes 4-7, 15
- TCVN, VHN 01:1998, VHN 02:1998
[edit] CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C
The Extension C comprises 4,149 characters that were added, in block 2A700-2B73F, in Unicode 5.2 (2009).
[edit] Charts
[edit] Sources
- China
- Encyclopedia of China
- Beijing University Founder DTP
- Hanyu character dictionary
- Hanyu word dictionary
- Old hanyu word dictionary
- Commercial Press Ideographs
- Xiandaihanyu Cidian
- Cihai
- Kangxi dictionary
- Chinese Academy of Surveying & Mapping
- Modern Chinese Dialect Encyclopedia
- Yanzhou jinwen jicheng yinde (殷周金文集成引得)
- Japan
- Japanese KOKUJI Collection
- South Korea
- Korean IRG Hanja Character Set 5th Edition: 2001
- North Korea
- KPS 10721:2003
- Vietnam
- Từ điển chữ Nôm (喃字典), Nguyễn Quang Hồng, 2006
- Từ điển chữ Nôm Tày, Hoàng Triều Ân, 2003
- Bảng tra chữ Nôm miền Nam, Vũ Văn Kính, 1994
- Other
- Unicode UTC
- ABC Chinese-English Dictionary, John DeFrancis (德范克), et al., eds., 2nd edition. (1998) Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press
- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Hong Kong division
- Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary, Robert H. Mathews (1975) Cambridge; Harvard University Press
- Guangyun
- Chinese bird system index (中国鸟类系统检索), Zheng Zhuoxin (郑作新), et al. (2000), Beijing, 科学出版社 (www.sciencep.com)
- Annotated Shuowen Jiezi, Duan Yucai
[edit] CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D
The Extension D comprises 222 characters that were added, in block 2B740-2B81F, in Unicode 6.0 (2010).
[edit] Charts
[edit] CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E (projected)
The CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E block was earlier provisional named Extension D.
CJK-E was originally intended to include another 16,000+ characters not present in CJK-C, however, in May 2007, the Republic of China (Taiwan) withdrew 6,545 personal name usage characters deemed no longer in use[7], and so has been reduced to approximately 10,000 characters.
[edit] CJK Compatibility Ideographs
Of the four compatibility CJK ideographs blocks in Unicode, only CJK Compatibility Ideographs block (F900–FAFF) actually contains twelve characters for CJK Unified Ideographs compatibility. All other compatibility ideographs do not relate to CJK Unification.
[edit] Charts
[edit] Known issues
[edit] Disunification of U+4039
The character U+4039 (䀹) was a unification of two different glyphs (one with jiā 夾 phonetic and one with shǎn 㚒 phonetic) until Unicode 5.0. However, they were lexically different that should not have been unified; they have different pronunciations and different meanings.
The proposal of disunification of U+4039[8] was accepted and the new character is encoded at U+9FC3 in Unicode 5.1.
[edit] Unified ideographs outside of the blocks
The CJK Compatibility Ideographs block (F900-FAFF) is not part of the "unified ideographs" list, but includes twelve characters that are in fact classified and named as unified ideographs: FA0E, FA0F, FA11, FA13, FA14, FA1F, FA21, FA23, FA24, FA27, FA28 and FA29.
[edit] Unifiable variants and exact duplicates in Extension B
In CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B, hundreds of glyph variants[9] were encoded, as well as six exact duplicates[10]:
- U+34A8 㒨 = U+20457 𠑗
- U+3DB7 㶷 = U+2420E 𤈎
- U+8641 虁 = U+27144 𧅄
- U+204F2 𠓲 = U+23515 𣔕
- U+249BC 𤦼 = U+249E9 𤧩
- U+24BD2 𤯒 = U+2A415 𪐕
[edit] Other CJK Ideographs in Unicode, not Unified
Apart from the five blocks of "Unified Ideographs", Unicode has about a dozen more blocks with not-unified CJK-characters. These are mainly CJK radicals, strokes, punctuation, marks, symbols and compatibility characters. Although some characters have their (decomposable) counterparts in other blocks, the usages can be different.
Four blocks (one of which is labelled "Unified Ideographs") of compatibility characters are included for compatibility with legacy text handling system and other legacy character sets. They include forms of characters for vertical text layout and rich text characters that Unicode recommends handling through other means. Therefore their use is discouraged.
Usually, compatibility characters are those that would not have been encoded except for compatibility and round-trip convertibility with other standards. However, the amount of CJK ideographs within any non-Unicode standard is too big to fit into Unicode's CJK Compatibility Ideographs blocks. Instead, code points are assigned when the affected characters are approved by the Unicode Consortium, but have yet to assign any code points within the CJK Unified Ideographs blocks.
[edit] Unicode version history
| CJK unified Ideographs additions per Unicode version | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode version | Addition | Plane | Characters added | Total Characters |
| 1.0 | CJK Unified Ideographs | Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) | 20,902 | 20,914 |
| CJK Compatibility Ideographs | BMP | 12 | ||
| 3.0 | CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A | BMP | 6,582 | 27,496 |
| 3.1 | CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B | Supplementary Ideographic Plane (SIP) | 42,711 | 70,207 |
| 4.1 | CJK Unified Ideographs: Ideographs from HKSCS-2004 and GB 18030-2000 not in ISO 10646 | BMP | 22 | 70,229 |
| 5.1 | CJK Unified Ideographs: Ideographs from Adobe Japan and disunification of U+4039 | BMP | 8 | 70,237 |
| 5.2 | CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C | SIP | 4,149 | 74,394 |
| 8 other characters from ARIB #47, #95, #93 and HKSCS | BMP | 8 | ||
| 6.0 | CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D | SIP | 222 | 74,616 |
| 6.1 | 1 character corresponding to Adobe-Japan1-6 CID+20156 | BMP | 1 | 74,617 |
[edit] Notes
- ^ Unicode 6.1 Character Database – property list file
- ^ The Unicode standard 4.0, Appendix A - Han Unification History
- ^ Suzanne Topping, The secret life of Unicode
- ^ The Unicode standard, 4.0, Chapter 11 - East Asian scripts
- ^ a b Andrew West, "The Secret Life of Variation Selectors", 28 June 2007, accessed 2008-08-02
- ^ PRI 108: Combined registration of the Adobe Japan1 collection and of sequences in that collection
- ^ IRG N 1306: Request to Withdraw 6545 T-Source from CJK D candidate
- ^ Andrew West and John Jenkins, proposal of disunification of U+4039
- ^ unifiable glyph variants
- ^ five of six exact duplicates
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Unicode Consortium U+4E00... (PDF)
- Information on a number of the 98,884 characters in Unicode 5.0 from the decodeUnicode Wiki project at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany
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