In the introduction to RTK3, Heisig states that originally "JIS-1" consisting of less than 3,000 kanji was installed as standard on computers, and a second list of around 4,000 kanji "JIS-2" was sold separately. Then on top of that, there was a "JIS supplement" consisting of an additional 5,801 kanji.

This means a total of around 12,800 kanji are available on computers at least when the introduction was written.

Here's my question: what exactly is the point of having 12,800 kanji on your computer? No human being could possibly remember that many. Why would someone need to use obscure kanji that their readers probably have never seen before? What are these additional vocabulary items anyway? And even if you know a select few readers out there may know these kanji, what's the point? Why not just write it phonetically?

Modern written Japanese does not require 12,800 kanji. I don't know, maybe before the post-war reforms it made more sense but why would anybody possibly need that many kanji on their laptop today?

I'd be curious to know if any of the 5,801 kanji from the JIS supplement are used often enough to justify having them on your PC.

Yes it's a big number for us foreign learners. I guess if you're a geologist for example, then you may want to use specific kanji for a whole lot of terms which you read about all the time but that the man on the street doesn't know. So I guess having them on the computer is useful for those who need them but doesn't disturb those who don't. Incidentally I'm surprised there aren't more.

Yeah, I agree that you would only need to have access to that many if you were a researcher in something (like classical Japanese or Japanese history), or for certain businesses (printing companies, etc.).

Even if no more than 10 scholars use it for their papers, then it's worth having on a computer. Thankfully, not everything in life needs a concrete day-to-day application. It's a way of preserving the language. If you can't print a word or the writing of a word, then it's as good as dead.

I'm also surprised there isn't actually more.

Here's a list of the JIS 3rd and 4th Level kanji, if anyone's interested in taking a peak:

http://www.est.co.jp/fe/fonttest/JIS2004-3.pdf

http://www.est.co.jp/fe/fonttest/JIS2004-4.pdf

What's the point of dictionaries? All of those words.

I believe I read most of the extra kanji aren't scientific kanji but ancient forms, etc.

They are needed to write the name or surname of historical figures and places, some of which use ancient forms of kanji.

Quite. If you were doing any work on early Japanese literature you'd need them.

I needed two or three kanji that weren't in the JIS 1 and 2 list writing my dissertation.

For the most part they're not necessary no matter what research you're doing, because once you get beyond the JIS1/2 level you're dealing almost exclusively with obsolete variant characters. They're important for people doing work with old sources who must have the exact characters used in a text and cannot replace them with more common variants. This applies mostly to people doing linguistic research where it's important that the variants be recorded exactly. In most cases kanji will just be converted to the forms on the Joyo list and you won't need those extra kanji.

In my own research I have not seen any names that required non-JIS1/2 kanji. The only place I had to use them was a section of my dissertation that was dealing with the exact kanji so I needed to have the two obsolete characters that JIS1/2 didn't have.

There are actually 4 joyo kanji in JIS level 3 since the reform in 2010, heh. 塡, 剝, 頰, ?

So you think it would be better to remove them lol? How would you feel if suddenly, it were impossible to write the word "xebec"?

Probably not a word you use really often, but Japanese is the primary language of million of people, so I think they should be able to write whatever they want to write in their own language, no matter how obscure or rare (or novel!) A lot of them have to do with names, which is even worst: Charles Diccens? Curt Vonnegut? Who needs a K? It's not like 13k characters were taking a lot of space on your computer ;P Few fonts include that many anyway.

Businesses also love to pick strange kanji for their names, to differentiate themselves and to call attention.
And like places, some companies are pretty old and predate the reforms.

Also the dictionaries themselves (those that show older forms) would look pretty weird without those kanji, full of GIFs(yuck).

comeauch Wrote:So you think it would be better to remove them lol? How would you feel if suddenly, it were impossible to write the word "xebec"?

Probably not a word you use really often, but Japanese is the primary language of million of people, so I think they should be able to write whatever they want to write in their own language, no matter how obscure or rare (or novel!) A lot of them have to do with names, which is even worst: Charles Diccens? Curt Vonnegut? Who needs a K? It's not like 13k characters were taking a lot of space on your computer ;P Few fonts include that many anyway.

It should be noted that Italians write Ettore and not Hettore anymore, and the same happens in other languages (including English and Japanese).

But I get what you mean!

In the Oxford Dictionary there are nearly 300,000 words, which is far more than even the most educated, well-written, and well-studied etymologist could ever hope to know or even encounter in a life-time of study (let alone Joe down the street).

Here's my question: what exactly is the point of having 300,000 words in your dictionary? No human being could possibly remember that many. Why would someone need to use obscure words that their readers probably have never seen before? What are these additional vocabulary items anyway? And even if you know a select few readers out there may know these words, what's the point? Why not just use synonyms?

afterglowefx Wrote:Here's my question: what exactly is the point of having 300,000 words in your dictionary? No human being could possibly remember that many. Why would someone need to use obscure words that their readers probably have never seen before? What are these additional vocabulary items anyway? And even if you know a select few readers out there may know these words, what's the point? Why not just use synonyms?

I guess the point is not so much that you would do so, but that somebody else might already have done so, and you may wish to know what the heck they were saying when they used that word.

It's not even necessarily because the writer was being intentionally obscure, words drop in and out of fashion, and what may have been colloquial when it was written could be totally unused today. Dictionaries are our memory in that regard, and like other people have said I think the same is true (to connect it back to the topic) with the extended JIS and unicode han character sets. It's not that the joetaro roppon in the street is using 麤 in his daily life, but maybe he sees it on a store, or a flier, or in a letter grandpa wrote in the interwar period.

More than anything though, there's little reason NOT to have them included in the character specs. They don't hurt anybody who has no need of them in any meaningful way...

[Zgarbas]

afterglowefx Wrote:In the Oxford Dictionary there are nearly 300,000 words, which is far more than even the most educated, well-written, and well-studied etymologist could ever hope to know or even encounter in a life-time of study (let alone Joe down the street).

Actually English is pretty much the language with the most words in the world atm, with some people estimating it to have passed the 1million mark. Of course, this is due to its widespread popularity and a eclectic regional slang. It's pretty crazy.
No one person will know all these words, but if you put its billion speakers together chances are they know all of them.

afterglowefx Wrote:In the Oxford Dictionary there are nearly 300,000 words, which is far more than even the most educated, well-written, and well-studied etymologist could ever hope to know or even encounter in a life-time of study (let alone Joe down the street).

Here's my question: what exactly is the point of having 300,000 words in your dictionary? No human being could possibly remember that many. Why would someone need to use obscure words that their readers probably have never seen before? What are these additional vocabulary items anyway? And even if you know a select few readers out there may know these words, what's the point? Why not just use synonyms?

I think you miss the point of what a dictionary such as the full Oxford is supposed to be - it isn't a giant vocabulary list for anyone to learn, nor is it a thesaurus for aspiring writers seeking to confuse their audience.

A full dictionary seeks to be as exhaustive as possible to preserve the language, which is kinda important, as well as to provide an exhaustive source for people to look up any unknown words they might run into, no matter how obscure.

Granted, with 300 000 entries, its unlikely that most will get any use, but if productivity and efficiency were the goals of a full dictionary, then... well, there wouldn't be any. It's mainly used as an exhaustive source for researchers and scholars, or by people who just appreciate beautiful tomes.

I fail to understand your question really, why would a dictionary need a reason to add obscure words ? Isn't giving the definition to obscure words the very point of a dictionary ?

And last of all, why should there even be a point to anything ? The beauty of the human mind is that we do and appreciate pointless things. Art is ultimately pointless, so why doing art, AMIRITE ? That's pretty much what separates us from animals.

Yeah, I went down the slippery slope here, I know. But my point still stands.

afterglowefx Wrote:In the Oxford Dictionary there are nearly 300,000 words, which is far more than even the most educated, well-written, and well-studied etymologist could ever hope to know or even encounter in a life-time of study (let alone Joe down the street).

Here's my question: what exactly is the point of having 300,000 words in your dictionary? No human being could possibly remember that many. Why would someone need to use obscure words that their readers probably have never seen before? What are these additional vocabulary items anyway? And even if you know a select few readers out there may know these words, what's the point? Why not just use synonyms?

You're missing what I'm getting at. I'm talking about words that a Japanese person might know when written phonetically but might not know the kanji for. In Japanese, any word that has a kanji can be written phonetically. My point is that if a kanji is so obscure and rarely used that it is in the JIS supplementary or whatever it's probably better to just write it phonetically so people can easily understand it.

I'm not talking about synonyms for "hard" words...I'm talking about writing out phonetically words that people know (phonetically) but might not know the kanji for.

Here's another point to consider. Remember that it was the Japanese government ITSELF who was whining and bitching that there were "too many kanji" and they were impeding literacy and therefore came up with the toyo/joyo kanji list to restrict the different kanji that could be used in printing and publishing to around 2,000 kanji.

So it's not just the non-Japanese "gringos" like me who think 12,800 kanji is excessive...the Japanese government itself does too.

English: yes, there's hundreds of thousands of words but most people when writing, printing and publishing try to use words they know their readers will understand without running to the dictionary. I do the same.

[Zgarbas]

There is a difference between "commonly used" and "the only ones that should exist".

Also, what is common for you is uncommon for others, depending on region, age, education level, field of work, etc.

john555 Wrote:You're missing what I'm getting at. I'm talking about words that a Japanese person might know when written phonetically but might not know the kanji for. In Japanese, any word that has a kanji can be written phonetically. My point is that if a kanji is so obscure and rarely used that it is in the JIS supplementary or whatever it's probably better to just write it phonetically so people can easily understand it.

I'm not talking about synonyms for "hard" words...I'm talking about writing out phonetically words that people know (phonetically) but might not know the kanji for.

You won't find the answer to this question here I'm afraid. You'd better go ask people who use obscure kanjis.

In all seriousness though, good elements of answers have been given in all the posts above. It's mostly used in print, for historical names, places, old pieces of literature, and etymological researches. It's all about preserving the language, because now it's done on computers.

I really fail to see why anyone would be bothered by that. The government has simplified the list of kanjis for general use, does that mean that the rest should just be trashed, buried, forgotten, and never used again ? Whether this many kanji is needed or not by the general population is, IMO, irrelevant. Some people might still want to use them, for whatever reason, and I'm pretty sure they would be (rightfully so) outraged if they couldn't.

The japanese writing system has always been a bit of a problem for the print media, for obvious reasons (have you seen early japanese typewriters ? They are ***** hilarious). Computers have made it convenient. No further reasons are needed. Are you really that offended by the additional kanjis that you should find "justification" to their presence ? I mean, if the additional kanji were to take 50% of your hard drive, then I'd understand your concerns, but unless you still run on floppy disks ...

There is also this little neat thing called furigana, which lets people with the extra kanji knowledge make use of that, while also writing it out phonetically for those who need it. Sure no one really uses it on the internet, but most publications do.

As other people have stated in different wordings, there is also a difference between, "its probably better to write phonetically", and "you may not under any circumstance write it in kanji".

There is also another point to consider. Sure the government saw the need to restrict the use of kanji, and implemented the toyo kanji, which set a hard limit on which characters you could use. But it didn't take long for them change that into joyo kanji, which is more of a base knowledge line of sorts. The kanji you should know without considering specialized areas, like medicine, history, physics, etc. Which says to me that there is a need for the extra kanji, just not for everyone at the same time. But removing the possibility for anyone to ever use the extra kanji doesn't really help anyone. If you really want to write it out phonetically and can't be arsed to use furigana, there is nothing or no one stopping you from doing so.

john555 Wrote:In the introduction to RTK3, Heisig states that originally "JIS-1" consisting of less than 3,000 kanji was installed as standard on computers, and a second list of around 4,000 kanji "JIS-2" was sold separately. Then on top of that, there was a "JIS supplement" consisting of an additional 5,801 kanji.

This means a total of around 12,800 kanji are available on computers at least when the introduction was written.

Here's my question: what exactly is the point of having 12,800 kanji on your computer? No human being could possibly remember that many. Why would someone need to use obscure kanji that their readers probably have never seen before?

To digitize historical materials, for instance. Or just to write about them, and be able to quote them unchanged.

There are other specialized fields in which one may use a Kanji most people don't know. Same reason why English has over a million words, I guess.

P.S. Just because the standard has 12,800 Kanji, doesn't mean that's how many Kanji everyone has on their computers. JIS is an encoding, not a font. It's fonts that have the actual Kanji.

Also, Shift JIS (the most commonly used encoding standard in Japan) doesn't have 12,800 Kanji, it only has the original 6,300. The extended version is for specialized uses.

Unicode, on the other hand (and Utf-8, and all the other implementations of it) which is what is mostly used in the West, has over 75,000 Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters. I'm guessing most of those are Kanji (traditional or simplified). And it has over 110,000 total characters. Basically, the UNICODE consortium adds any character it can find, just in case someone needs it.

But, like I said, that has nothing to do with how many characters there are on your computer. Your computer needs a font file, to display any writing. Just because Unicode, or the new JIS, or any other standard has a million zillion characters, doesn't mean you can display them. Someone still has to create a font that can display them. And fonts are created for a subset of them (because creating a font with 110,000 characters would be a monumental task). I don't know how many Kanji popular Japanese fonts have, but it's probably not 12,000.

They wanted to include oracle bone script in Unicode too, but they scrapped the idea later. Maybe in the future...