alt Hacker NewsHan-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
Replies
Sorry, probably not very standard terminology. I somehow picked it up from the OReilly book: Fonts & Encodings: From Advanced Typography to Unicode and Everything in Between
Page 55:
""" there are characters with no glyphs. glyphs that can correspond to a number of different characters according to context. Glyphs that correspond to multiple characters at the same time (with weightings assigned to each), and even more possibilities.
The problem of glyphs and characters is so complex that it has gone beyond the realm of computer specialists and has come to be of interest even to philosophers. For example, the Japanese philosopher Shigeki Moro, who has worked with ideographic characters in Buddhist documents, goes so far in his article Surface or Essence: Beyond Character Model Set [274] as to say that Unicode's approach is Aristotelian essentialist and to recommend supplanting it by an approach inspired by Jacques Derrida's theory of writing [114, 115]. The reader interested in the philosophical aspects of the issue is invited to consult [165,156], in addition to the works cited above. """
I think "essentialist" is probably a good description of the philosophy of how Unicode defines characters as opposed to fonts and glyphs, so I adopted it.
I think the Aristotelian (though I might have reached for Platonic) idea is that there is an "A" which is essential, and that you map many various "A"s to that one A - which results in weirdness when you leave the Latin-alphabet based languages.
(Arguably even in English we run into the fact that there is not one "A" - there are many "A"s that sound and act completely different, and we collapsed them into one representation.)
Thank you for this post! Everytime I see another Online Armchair Ideograph Expert opine about the Han Unification effort as being "a mess", I roll my eyes. There was a large, well-respected team of linguists and cultural archeologists (I don't know the correct term to use here) that worked on that project. Whatever I will learn about Chinese characters in my life, I will never know as much as that group of scholars.