on U+7384 (was Re: Synthetic scripts (was: Re: Private Use Agreements and Unappr oved Characters))

From: Thomas Chan (tc31@cornell.edu)
Date: Fri May 10 2002 - 17:18:56 EDT


On Sat, 16 Mar 2002, John H. Jenkins wrote:

> On Friday, March 15, 2002, at 07:39 PM, Thomas Chan wrote:
> > Is this open to names written with taboo-avoiding forms of characters
> > which omit strokes? e.g., U+7384 less the final stroke. Or are these
> > unified with the normal forms?
>
> The UTC will consider at its next meeting a proposal for a IDEOGRAPHIC
> TABOO VARIATION INDICATOR for precisely this reason. Sorry.

I just found U+248E5 as the four-stroke taboo-avoiding form of U+7384.
(That disqualifies me there! :) I didn't expect to find it disunified.)

The kIRGKangXi fields for both also suggests that they are not unified
(although kAlternateKangXi and kKangXi sometimes say otherwise).

However, it seems that the four- and five-stroke forms are unified and
interchangeable when used as radicals for U+7385 .. U+7388, U+248E6 ..
U+248E8--these characters are given in the _Kangxi Zidian_ with the
four-stroke form radical, but kIRGKangXi maps them anyway. I guess it'd
stink to have to encode "dupes" just for the sake of taboo. (Taboos
aside, I find many cases of this elsewhere, where two characters are not
unified in isolation, but apparently only one participates as a component
in the formation of other characters.)

And to think that U+248E5 could've been avoided if Kangxi was published
post-Qing, or if a post-Qing "corrected" edition (i.e., taboos removed
and orig. characters restored) had been used (I have no idea if such a
thing exists, though).

Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu



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