Coding of the Chinese characters

The initials CJC indicate the writings Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which use all the three characters Han, Chinese characters known as Hanzi in Chinese, Kanji in Japanese, or Hanja in Korean, as well as national characters. The polemic concerns especially simplified Chinese (of Popular republic of China and, officially Singapore and Hong-Kong), traditional Chinese (with Taiwan, Singapore, Hong-Kong and in Korea) and Japanese.

These characters ideographic evolved/moved with the wire of the centuries in these various countries and have quite different layouts today. The continental Chinese simplified them much, the Japanese made minor modifications there, while the countries or cities using traditional Chinese kept the characters of origin without any modification. The Japanese added there their spelling-books Hiragana and Katakana and the Koreans their alphabet Hangûl, but those being coded separately in Unicode, their data-processing use does not pose problem.

The direction having also deviated, the pronunciation itself being different, of many Asian linguists regards these characters as being quite different.

However, the Consortium Unicode and the ISO (as well as the work group UniHan to which the authorities of Chinese, Japanese and Korean standardizations belong, and who is in load of the identification and the unification of the very many characters ideographic before their standardization by the ISO and Unicode…) consider that the characters Chinese, Korean and Japanese are the same ones, that only the glyphes (eye S in French) differ. The difference would be comparable with the languages latines : traditionally in German the Gothic font face is privileged, in French a police force with sérifs and English a police force without sérifs. Consequently, they are coded in the same way and it is necessary to use a suitable police force to post the characters in the style which is appropriate best for the local practices.

Consequently :

It is impossible to know in which language is written a character (thus which glyphe to use to represent it), it is not besides a single problem with the CJC (how to know if has is German or français ?),
to mix Japanese and Chinese (for example, by quoting a word of Confucius in its language in a Japanese work) in a text not marked out or without using the linguistic labels of Unicode can pose problems of esthetics,
a work concerning old Japanese will unify characters which do not exist any more in the modern language but call upon quite different concepts for a specialist.

For this reason, much of Japanese refuse to see in Unicode a system of universal coding. A professor of the Université of Tokyo proposed besides a new system of coding integrated into an embarked operating system: TRON. This one makes it possible to code all the characters existing or having existed, which is useful for the Japanese linguists or historians quoting the characters disappeared in their publications.

Vis-a-vis these criticisms however, Unicode comes to open a repertory of standardized alternatives, which will make it possible to differentiate (in an optional way) the unified idéographes when that is necessary. This additional repertory does not require an addition of additional natures in Unicode or ISO/IEC 10646 and does not compromise the work of unification carried out (the standard Unicode reference already of the graphic alternatives for the symbols of mathematical use).

But to open the door completely with differently coded graphic alternatives is unacceptable because that would pose many problems of interworking of the documents which, consequently, would depend specific font faces, since the glyphes are the object of protections of intellectual property. That would compromise the standard completely and would make almost impossible the data conversion of different sources, each one using its own font faces. The solution of the coding of graphic alternatives is open character by character, but only whenever differentiation is necessary to allow one made correct and readable of the coded texts.

See too

additional Character set of HongKong

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