From: John Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Thu Dec 25 2003 - 10:29:16 EST
On Dec 24, 2003, at 1:10 PM, Elaine Keown wrote:
> I hesitate to ask this, but what is the current
> opinion on how many Han characters there are?
>
Properly speaking, nobody knows. My older estimate would have been on
the order of 80,000, but it's clear that this is way too small.
Unicode currently has 70,000+ encoded ideographs with another ten
thousand or so coming down the pike. Even allowing for unification
errors in the standard, there are well over 100,000. My own dictum on
the subject is, "No list of Han ideographs is ever complete." (And
this isn't just a matter of people making up new ones. We've got a
huge extant literature extending over thousands of years to look
through for actual ideographs which have been used in the past. The
problem is akin to trying to exhaustively list every English word.)
========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jhjenkins@mac.com
http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/
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