Re: Unihan and U+939D

From: Andrew West (andrewcwest@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 07:31:53 CDT

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    On 14/06/05, Benjamin Kite <dharbigt@pobox.com> wrote:
    >
    > The Unihan definition for U+939D (æp) is presently "tc". I assume this
    > stands for "traditional character".

    "tc" is a little terse. In fact "tc"stands for the element technetium.
    Both U+939D and U+951D (a simplified character which also has the
    Unihan definition of "tc") are used to translate the name of this
    element in Chinese. I guess the Unihan definition should be "Tc"
    rather than "tc", and perhaps "Tc (technetium)" would be even clearer.

    > As a point of information, U+939D refers to an iron rake (a.k.a. Ìú´î).

    Of course most ideographs have multiple meanings, and the definitions
    given in the Unihan database are far from comprehensive -- personally
    I think that English definitions are somewhat beyond the necessary
    scope of Unihan, as they will always be incomplete and inaccurate to a
    greater or lesser degree.

    >
    > In a related discovery, Unihan doesn't seem to include a reference to
    > the semantic relationship between U+939D (æp) and U+642D (´î).

    True.

    >
    > Lastly, there is a simplified version of U+939D with the standard
    > simplification (U+9485 - îÄ) of the Kangxi gold radical (U+2FA6 - ½ð),
    > but it doesn't seem to appear in Unicode anywhere at present.

    The simplified form is encoded at U+28C4F.

    > Is the consortium finished its accommodation of CJK ideographs?
    >

    Far from it, there are tens of thousands of new characters in the
    pipeline, as well as completely new blocks covering "Old Hanzi" such
    as the forms of ideographs used in oracle bone inscriptions.

    Incidentally, most of the work on encoding CJKV ideographs is not done
    by the Unicode Consortium directly, but by the IRG (Ideographic
    characters Raporteur Group) <http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/> which
    comprises members from China, Japan, N.Korea, S.Korea, Vietnam,
    Taiwan, etc.

    > I'm sending this to this list because I've sent several corrections on
    > Unihan without receiving any acknowledgment.

    I haven't seen anything from you on Unihan. You probably need to
    subscribe to the Unihan list first.

    Andrew

    > Is this standard operating procedure? It's nice to know that input is
    > appreciated (if it is). If it isn't, there's probably no reason to
    > continue trying to improve the Unihan database.
    >
    > And, once again, if the group working on Unihan is short-handed, I'd be
    > willing to contribute some of my own time.
    >
    >



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