alt Hacker NewsYes. As far as I understood it, the result was an incoherent mess.
I think some characters got different code points, while others were merged. And apparently the Japanese complained bitterly over the ones that were merged. If you had read any articles about that, this is probably what you have in mind right now.
And I'm also a bit tilted by the ones that had different code points, because when processing CJK text now we have to deal with characters that are (in my native Cantonese) essentially the same, looks similar (to my undiscriminating eyes), yet having different code points so that things like text search sometimes don't work.
Of course I'm not "blaming" the Japanese, if anything the simplified vs traditional Chinese thing is much more of a practical problem, and the conflicting code points I deal with on a routine basis are more of a Hong Kong vs Taiwan thing, but I was told that the Unified CJK thing adopted a different "philosophy" from the rest of Unicode (which I think really is some kind of Aristotelian essentialism...) mostly due to vocal objections from the Japanese.
Replies
> As far as I understood it, the result was an incoherent mess.
> I was told that the Unified CJK thing adopted a different "philosophy" from the rest of Unicode
What would that philosophy be about? Sounds apocryphal. Unicode has never done "unification" like that for other languages/scripts?
i/ı/i, ö/ø/ø̈/oͤ: Same same, different codepoints.
Search and sorting is a mess everywhere. Depending on your locale, ö sorts either after o or after z. Sometimes it's semantically and phonetically equivalent to o wrt search but moreoften not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96
I don't know but last I glanced at it, the Unification was implied to be coming from Chinese pressure than Japanese. Each of Kanji/Hanzi countries already had each own acceptable common use character sets and those could have been just populated into each own spaces. That seemed like the original plan at some point.
There has to be a reason why it happened(as to why Unicode suddenly started insisting it has to fit inside a 2^16 total chars or whatever).
Interesting. I guess there are no well working normalization functions as there are for the different code points that can make umlauts (äöü)?
>having different code points so that things like text search sometimes don't work.
Cross language search seems like a hack to me. Searching in Chinese should find Chinese words and searching in Japanese should find Japanese words. Being able to search in Japanese and get Chinese results is not what most users want, unless they don't have a proper keyboard.
Han-unification was the result of Asian scholars, in particular the Ideaographic Research Group [1]
I have no idea what "Aristotelian essentialism" is supposed to mean, or if you are saying that the unification was that.
> And apparently the Japanese complained bitterly over the ones that were merged.
and
> but I was told that the Unified CJK thing adopted a different "philosophy" from the rest of Unicode [...] mostly due to vocal objections from the Japanese.
Seems to contradict each other.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic_Research_Group