From: Julian Bradfield (jcb+unicode@inf.ed.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 20 2007 - 09:08:30 CDT
I have a problem understanding a particular case of the application of
the Han unification criteria, and should be grateful if somebody could
explain what's going on.
The criteria say that only characters with the same abstract shape can
be unified, where abstract shape means roughly hierarchical structure
down to the level of radicals. (It's not made precise, of course.)
There is one specific example where two characters are unified,
although they appear to me to be very clearly examples of different
abstract shapes.
The characters are the Chinese and Japanese versions of U+5C07
(amongst other things, the jiang4 in Chinese ma2-jiang4).
In Chinese fonts, this character is:
left: radical 90 "half tree trunk"
right: top: radical 36 "evening" plus extra dot (this dot being
omitted in the simplified form)
bottom: radical 41 "inch"
In Japanese fonts, the top right component is instead the variant form
of radical 87 "claw".
The Unicode reference charts use the Chinese form, and the Japanese
form is not included in Unicode. But since it seems clearly to differ in
"abstract shape", why not?
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