From: Allen Haaheim (haaheima@interchange.ubc.ca)
Date: Tue Jul 08 2003 - 01:17:46 EDT
Hi,
Any similarity between U+5b50 子 at 3 strokes, and U+4e88 予 at 4, is
superficial. For example, U+2007 迺 is a common variant for 4e43 乃 ("is,"
"then") but can't be confused 逎 900e ("alcoholic beverage"). (Context
usually makes that clear pretty quickly!) Since 79ed and 25771 seem to be
both interchangeable for your purpose, as well as both still in fairly
common use, I agree a note would be a good idea.
(Someone correct me please, if the following method should not be used for
Japanese--I'm sure it is fine with Chinese.) If you can't get 25771 to work,
for the note you might consider using a certain "Ideographic Description
Character," namely U+2FF0 ⿰, which indicates that the two characters to
follow
are meant to represent the two left/right components of the originally
desired character.
Otherwise you will simply have two incorrect graphs (79be 禾 and 4e88 予),
even if what you really
mean is obvious enough. E.g., something like "Also written as⿰禾予."
There is an explanation in English here (bottom of page):
http://deall.ohio-state.edu/grads/chan.200/cjkv/elevator.html
Allen
When you raise chickens, you let them eat what they want,
As soon as they fatten, you boil them in a pot.
This plan is the best for the man who owns them,
But for heaven's sake, don't let the chickens know!
Yüan Mei (1776), trans. J.D. Schmidt
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tex Texin" <tex@i18nguy.com>
To: "Ben Monroe" <bendono@comcast.net>
Cc: <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 06, 2003 6:51 PM
Subject: Re: The character for 10**24 in Japanese numbers (jo)
Thanks very much Ben.
The radical I see used on several web pages corresponds to either U+4E88 or
U+5B50 (child), they are very similar.
If you look at the Unicode charts, the character 79ED has a radical on the
right which doesn't look like the child character at all (to me).
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U4E00.pdf
For ext. B, the character James suggested U+25771 also has the child
radical.
However, the other two U+25797, U+25791 do not.
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U20000.pdf
If you look at the charts you can see what I am referring to.
The character is often represented by two characters as I did on my page or
as
a glyph image. Very often it is not displayed at all, and is skipped in
lists
of these characters used for numbers. That's why I am kind of stuck not
wanting to recommend a single JIS-based character, if they have been
rejected
by many users, and also not wanting to lead in a new direction, unless there
is a preponderance of agreement it is the right thing to do. It might be
best
to continue with the two-character or glyph approach.
I agree that this number is not going to be used a lot and therefore it may
not bear a great investment in sweating over which character(s) to use, but
on
the other hand I like to make my pages accurate with reasonable
recommendations.
I was hoping Unicode 4.0 would have a clear solution to the problem, and if
the character U+25771 were in the BMP, and if font vendors told me they were
going to support it reasonably soon, then it seems to me to be the right
thing
to recommend (with a caution perhaps) going forward. Given it is part of
Ext.
B, support seems far away at best and therefore not a good recommendation.
At this point, I probably should footnote the character and provide the
suggestions you have documented (which I appreciate!). Before I do, let me
know what you think of the glyphs in the Unicode charts, to make sure that
the
rightside radicals there, are something you would agree are reasonable
alternatives to child. They look nothing like U+4E88 or U+5B50.
I am hoping this won't take 1 jo/shi of emails to straighten out!
BTW, I should mention my knowledge around Kanji is next to nil and my
sources
were mostly other web pages I searched out, so this purely a layman's effort
on my part and given the accuracy of the web, I will change positions
easily.
tex
Ben Monroe wrote:
>
> [UTF-8]
>
> Tex Texin wrote:
>
> > On shi/jo the glyph I see in Windows charmap doesn't look
> > right. Perhaps it is my particular set of fonts. I expect to
> > see a radical on the right that looks like the character for
> > child, and charmap shows something else. I'll wait to see if
> > someone else chimes in pro or con.
>
> The right side of the character probably has U+4E88 äº^ instead of U+5B50
å (child). These two characters are different. As I mentioned before,
there are several different glyphs used to write shi/jo.
> Several of the forms are U+79ED ç§, U+25797 ð¥z-, U+25791 ð¥z', and
U+25771 ð¥±.
> These all express the value of 10^24 and are read as shi or jo, depending
on your source.
>
> > Also, I wonder what the correct thing to recommend would be?
> > Assuming surrogate support was consistently available, and
> > fonts were available containing this character (are there any
> > today?), since the character was not generally being written
> > as a single character until now (and I am still not sure if the
> > pair U+79BE U+4E88 is the correct alternative), would it be
> > right to recommend this for people to use in number writing
> > going forward? I tend to think of Ext. B as there for historic
> > and special characters, not those that might be used every day.
>
> If you are worried about surrogate support and font availability, then
U+79ED may be the best, which is attested and documented, and listed in
modern dictionaries. Both Koujien and Daijirin (available online at
http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/index.html?kind=jn&mode=0se this glyph for
it's entry of "shi". Otherwise, go for U+25771, which seems to be attested
the most in documents. Daijirin uses this glyph for it's entry of "jo", but
Koujien does not list it.
>
> However, these are not really "every day" characters, at least in my
experience. Most people will know "chou", some will know "kei", fewer will
know "gai", and even fewer will know "shi/jo". I would be a little surprised
if many people could list the rest off the top of their head without prior
special study or other references.
>
> Ben Monroe
> [For those looking for my original e-mail message that Tex responded to, I
accidentally sent it under a new address forgetting to update my
subscription information after my e-mail address changed. (Old one is still
being forwarded to this one.)]
-- ------------------------------------------------------------- Tex Texin cell: +1 781 789 1898 mailto:Tex@XenCraft.com Xen Master http://www.i18nGuy.com XenCraft http://www.XenCraft.com Making e-Business Work Around the World -------------------------------------------------------------
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