A spectre is haunting Unicode

joshdavham

The author Paul McCann (polm) is one of my favourite programmers out there! He’s done awesome work in the Japanese NLP space over the last decade which has really helped me in my language learning projects. He maintains a mecab (Japanese tokenizer) wrapper for Python [0], has a book on Japanese NLP written for English speakers [1] and also worked on Spacy at one point [2]. [0] https://github.com/polm/fugashi [1] https://www.japanesenlp.com/ [2] https://spacy.io/

hnfong

Well, vast swaths of the Kangxi dictionary (which serves as "sources" for probably most of the CJK characters) are such "ghost" characters as described in the article... The peculiar properties of CJK characters and the philosophy (apparently the Japanese did not like Unicode's tendencies towards Aristotelian essentialism) under which they were implemented in Unicode probably singlehandedly forced unicode to expand beyond the BMP....

philipov

"- the spectre of communism. All the powers of old encoding have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre..."

erjiang

I think there’s evidence found for the origin of “彁” as the result of a poor scan of a newspaper article. Look up “彁 新聞” to find some japanese sources about this.

sedatk

Fascinating. But, I guess it's better to have superfluous invalid characters than missing real ones.

panzi

Is anyone using these characters now for anything? No youth language or online slang using it?

eviks

> The original character (𡚴) was not added to JIS or Unicode until much later and doesn't display on most sites for me Why didn't they simly replace the original bad one? > nine hundred pages. Imagine tracking down a single character without a page reference Not that hard to imagine, OCR existed back then?

gweinberg

It occurs to me that we can use 彊 to mean "a completely unknown concept that cannot be named". For example if you ask, "when Cthulhu rises from its slumber, what is thefirst thing it will do? Probably it will 彊.

xelxebar

Xu Bing has a book that consists entirely of invented characters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Book_from_the_Sky

Dwedit

Saw headline, expected branch prediction vulnerability involving Unicode, was surprised at a completely different topic.

amake

Should probably have "(2008)" in the title

pocksuppet

A language where you can make up new characters seems anathema to a universal character encoding.

tengwar2

Before that, there was the case of ÿ and Ÿ in the base IBM character set (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ÿ ). The former exists in a handful of proper nouns in French and Hungarian (as in about five proper nouns), but only as a y with a diæresis, which would normally be handled with a Unicode modifier symbol. It is also used in a couple of endangered languages in South America, which would not have influenced the character getting in to a PC character set. It is thought that possibly it was supposed to represent the Dutch "ij" character, but apparently that is never written as "ÿ" in print. Ÿ seems to not be used by any language.

schoen

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Book_from_the_Sky (a 1988 art project based on intentionally making up ghost characters by hand and printing a whole book with nonexistent but aesthetically plausible Chinese characters). Amusingly, Wikipedia mentions that over a dozen of them (out of about 4,000) were later found to accidentally exist!

podocarp

So what is the spectre? I thought this was proposing something new like the manifesto

zahlman

(2018) I've seen YouTube videos on this topic before. > The original character (𡚴) was not added to JIS or Unicode until much later and doesn't display on most sites for me. It's from Unicode version 3.1 (published 2001) so this is surprising.