From: "Ayers, Mike" <Mike_Ayers@bmc.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2000 4:40 PM
>
> > From: 11digitboy@bolt.com [mailto:11digitboy@bolt.com]
>
> >
> > I have seen U+3007 classified as a Hanzi. Why is
> > it not considered a Hanzi in Unicode? Because it
> > is the only Hanzi that uses that stroke??
> > If it is not a Hanzi, what, then, is it?
> >
>
> It appears to be the glyph that was being pushed at one point for
> use as 0, as a complement to the well-known glyphs for 1-10. There are two
> sets of glyphs for 1-10, one set being one or two strokes apiece and widely
> used, the other set are many strokes, and are used primarily when writing
> checks, since they cannot be easily converted one to another. There is no
> corresponding "simple" glyph for zero, which, if I recall correctly, has 13
> strokes. My Chinese textbook (written at Peking University in the late
> fifties) uses a circle to indicate 0. However, I have never seen it used
> elsewhere, and believe that it never caught on.
>
I have letterhead from Japanese companies which
uses this character for telephone numbers and postal
codes. Also have a laminated flyer from perhaps the
1970's which includes this zero character in citation
numbers. Even though Chinese numbering system has
no need of zero, it seems to have some uses for this
character in references. Mostly, though, the current
practice appears to just use western numbers.
This circular stroke does appear as a component of
a few of the CJK characters in plain 2.
Best regards,
James Kass.
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