Talk:Variant Chinese characters

Relevant image

A variant character of "國" used exclusively within Korea.

Would this image be relevant in improving the article? Just placing it here in case someone needs it. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email guestbook complaints 13:44, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Better definition?

Variants aren't really just allographs. People should be able to read all allographs of the same grapheme, but some people can't read certain variants, e.g. 㠯 is a variant of 以, but some people can't read it, so we can't call it an allograph. Can someone come up with a better definition for variants? Asoer (talk) 01:17, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Question about Kangxi and Traditional characters in Taiwan

望 in three styles: Kāngxī 康熙字典, TW Sòngtǐ 宋體 and TW Kǎitǐ 楷體.

I would like to know whether there are some Chinese characters when there is some significant difference between the KANGXI form and the current Taiwanese form. I am not talking about very small design differences like for 亡. Thank you! Maidodo (talk) 15:10, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi Maidodo, I’ve produced and uploaded a graphic showing the character 望 for you. This character also contains 亡 which you mentioned, but the major difference is the “moon-flesh” element.

P.S. The rumour is that Korean Hanja are most similar to Kāngxī style Chinese characters because their shapes didn’t get re-standardized after the Kāngxī Dictionary was published. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 17:09, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

P.P.S. Talking about “moon-flesh,” the Kāngxī Dictionary doesn’t observe different shapes of 月 as a radical, i.e. whether they are variants of “moon” or of “flesh” 肉 they look the same (as in Mainland China), not different (as in Taiwan). Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 17:20, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you so much LiliCharlie, I am very happy with your reply. I didn't know that such "big" differences exist. Could I ask you two additional things if you have time?

• In the Wiktionary, I looked up 望. The form showed in Translingual section is different both from 望 and from the KANGXI form. It looks more like the Japanese form but I am pretty sure it is a Chinese font used in the template. Do you know what is the form used in the Translingual?
• I seek a way to display the KANGXI forms with a combination of a Unicode character (or entity number) and a tag. Is it impossible? The reason is I would like to propose on the Japanese or French Wiktionary to display the Chinese characters in the following manner: KANGXI form (translingual); Taiwanese norm (tradit.); PRC norm (simpl.); variants with Japanese font. I have an issue with the KANGXI part, because I don't know how to display it.

--Maidodo (talk) 13:50, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

• Hi Maidodo, the problem with Kāngxī display is that 1. hardly any (and certainly no common) fonts have been produced in this style and 2. there is no markup for a defined Kāngxī locale either, so in the “Translingual” (as in the “Chinese”) section of 望 on Wiktionary the character carries the markup lang=zh for (unspecified) Chinese, which will be displayed according to one’s default system/browser settings for Chinese. (On my machine it’s Simplified Chinese.)
• Ken Lunde of Adobe has written a proposal to the UTC that would allow Unicode encoding of different CJKV locales in plain text (=using only Unicode characters without markup), and this proposal includes a Kāngxī (pseudo-)locale. For further details, see The “PanCJKV” IVD Collection—Unregistered and Proposal to accept the submission to register the “PanCJKV” IVD collection. — Because you mentioned tags: Please read Unicode’s web page Language Tagging to learn that language tag characters were not created for HTML and similar protocols rich in markup, therefore you can’t expect any browser to understand and handle them as such. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 15:22, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks a lot LiliCharlie. Your explanation and references are really nice. I read the proposal. Some part are too technical for me, but it is amazing. If I understand well, it could allow to display in plain text mode all ideographs x 11 regions (including the Kāngxī pseudo-region). I am a bit confused with the "alias" concept, but, in this proposal, at the end, is it reasonnable to say that the genuine Kāngxī forms (not the Korean ones) will be available? Because for 曜 Korean form shows something close enough to the Kāngxī form, but with 望 it is not the case (to me), the first stroke of 王 is a significant difference, and there is also the form of 亡.

Thank you about your remark on tags. I should have said markup. --Maidodo (talk) 05:45, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi Maidodo, thanks for your thanks and don’t worry about the "alias" concept. This has nothing to do with later implementation, but with the fonts that Ken Lunde has by now developed: currently Source Han Sans ≈ Noto Sans CJK exist in versions for Mainland China (CN), Taiwan (TW), South Korea (KR), and Japan (JP), so the font he uses to illustrate his proposal (SourceHanSansR11-Regular.otf) contains only glyphs from these four locales (the darker columns in this graphic). The other seven locales are currently illustrated by (frequently incorrect) “alias” glyphs taken en bloc from one of these four, for example the Kāngxī (XK) locale uses glyphs that actually reflect KR usage. You correctly observed that Korean 望 is different from Kāngxī 望, but in the by now existent illustrative font/test font they look the same. Ken has plans to change this over time, and the next font will probably be the one for Hong Kong (HK), which he and his team will produce after the forthcoming HKSCS revision. Ken actually hopes the HK font will be done sometime this year, but it is not yet clear when the Kāngxī font (and a “PanCJKV” font containing genuine Kāngxī glyphs) will follow.

As far as display of Kāngxī is concerned the timeline for actual usability in Wiki projects is unfortunately rather long. I suppose it will take years or a decade or even longer before all major operating systems ship with appropriate fonts (Kāngxī is certainly not on their priority list), and another 5–10 years before the vast majority of users are equipped with such an OS. Désolé ! Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 17:36, 9 May 2016 (UTC) -- Thank you so much! I just hope I will not take 20 years ;) Until then, we will still rely on pictures / scan of the Kāngxī... --Maidodo (talk) 01:43, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Right, Maidodo. I produced such graphics of the Kāngxī radicals in early 2014, and if you email me I will be pleased to send you a font containing about 17,000 scanned Kāngxī characters. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 13:33, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

OR

@Verdy p please stop adding your uncited paragraph. I am well aware much of the content of the article is uncited—I didn't add any of it, but I had added the article's first citations, and I would like to make it a Good Article once I'm finished working on Chinese characters and Classical Chinese. You are directly working against policy, you are required not to readd citations when asked. Please remove it. Remsense诉 17:44, 25 April 2024 (UTC)