I always thought most Japanese people would use simplified forms (even if non-jouyou)... especially with something like the road primitive. It's kind of a baseless presumption from me, probably due to the fact that my favorite Japanese handwritten font, the EPSON one, simplifies it all.

Yet in this video　-

- "辿" is written with two dots... around 1:25

Does anyone knows how common this is? (especially with the road prim., but any other "common" simplification too...)

It is a very common thing with kanji that are not in the jouyou list unfortunately. As far as I know the Ministry of Education made a decision at some point that non-jouyou kanji were to be written in their traditional forms instead of following the normal simplification rules. Thus 辿 has two dots, 饉 uses the old "eat" and "cabbage" and 臍 uses 齊 instead of 斉 and so on. This has also given rise to some confusion on how characters are to be written which is why both 藪 and 薮 exist.

In my own humble opinion this system is illogical and stupid and should be changed. Personally I like the predictability of traditional characters but I think it's highly unlikely that they'll revert back to that. So instead I pray that they make all characters follow the general simplification rules at some point.

However, as long as you know a little bit about the old forms of characters I think it's unlikely that understanding will be lost if you use one or the other. 頬 and 頰 are after all essentially the same thing.

Taishi Wrote:As far as I know the Ministry of Education made a decision at some point that non-jouyou kanji were to be written in their traditional forms instead of following the normal simplification rules.

Some non-joyo kanji have gone through minor "simplifications," and by that I mean that their stroke order has been revised.

冴 should be a 6-stroke character, but its stroke order follows the rules for joyo kanji, so it has 7.
漑 should be a 14-stroke character, but it has 15.

Taishi Wrote:It is a very common thing with kanji that are not in the jouyou list unfortunately. As far as I know the Ministry of Education made a decision at some point that non-jouyou kanji were to be written in their traditional forms instead of following the normal simplification rules.

The history behind that, according to a monograph I've read about Chinese characters, if I remember right is that the characters outside the tōyō kanji list, back in 1946, were not given any thought because the intent was to make everyone use only characters in the list, substituting characters outside it for phonetic equivalents or kana, with the goal of abolishing Chinese characters altogether later on. That didn't work out quite well and Japanese people continued using many non-tōyō kanji, writing them as they were used to, and it was never corrected by the Japanese government. Subsequent members of the Ministry of Education were much more lenient, even more than before, so the only thing they did was to add some of the most-often used non-tōyō kanji to the jōyō kanji list and a small number of simplifications here and there.

So, it's not that people should write using the "traditional" form, it's just that those characters were never simplified/standardized by the government to begin with, and since people didn't follow the government's idea of using only the characters in the list, they now just write these characters the way they know them. People could theoretically use simplified or invented forms—actually more before the computer era than now—just like the Chinese used to do (which was what prompted the idea of standardizing and simplifying the characters in China, because that was getting out of hand), but in Japan people never did anything in any expressive way that could prompt a reaction by the government, so you end up with what you have now.

Ah, I see... that's very interesting, thanks! I had this crazy idea that maybe, just maybe, he kind of looked it up by typing it using a basic Mincho font and simply draw it from that (since it's not the most common kanji ever, I suppose) I know it's probably a rude thing to think, but I really have no idea yet about what's common knowledge and what's kind of though for natives!

Is the two dots thing really considered the "traditional" form in Japanese? That's quite odd, since it's just a variant way of writing the component. Both the one- and two-dots forms coexisted just fine for nearly two thousand years, and it even looks like the one dot form was more common (at least I see more examples of it written that way). Even 王羲之, who I understand is essentially the 書道 god to the Japanese, wrote it with only one dot.

I will say that the two dots form preserves the 小篆 form of the character a bit better. Go any further back though, and the 辵 is actually 行, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Looks like the modern form 辵/辶 is just a corruption after all.

/pedantism

bflatnine Wrote:Is the two dots thing really considered the "traditional" form in Japanese?

Yes, it seems so. In printed matter, at least, my understanding is that the two-dot version was the de-facto standard up until the big joyo-kanji reform. I just flipped through a book I have that was published in 1942, and all of the shinnyou kanji I found had two dots. The same can be seen in Chinese. Traditional (by which I mean 繁体字) Chinese uses double dots, while Simplified Chinese uses single dots.

But given the facts you just quoted, I would expect you to know all this already, so I'm curious what you're trying to argue here. Just the semantics of the word "traditional?"

JimmySeal Wrote:The same can be seen in Chinese. Traditional (by which I mean 繁体字) Chinese uses double dots, while Simplified Chinese uses single dots.

What are you basing this on? The standard in Taiwan is one dot. I'm fairly certain the same is true in Hong Kong. Of course, not everyone follows the standard, and this is especially true when you start bringing different fonts into the picture. But I can't accept the notion that the two dots version is somehow "traditional" while the one dot version is simplified. The situation just isn't that simple.

As for your question, I'm not really trying to argue anything. Just curious about how "traditional" is used here, and in particular if that's how Japanese people understand the term too.

bflatnine Wrote:

JimmySeal Wrote:The same can be seen in Chinese. Traditional (by which I mean 繁体字) Chinese uses double dots, while Simplified Chinese uses single dots.

What are you basing this on? The standard in Taiwan is one dot. I'm fairly certain the same is true in Hong Kong. Of course, not everyone follows the standard, and this is especially true when you start bringing different fonts into the picture. But I can't accept the notion that the two dots version is somehow "traditional" while the one dot version is simplified. The situation just isn't that simple.

As for your question, I'm not really trying to argue anything. Just curious about how "traditional" is used here, and in particular if that's how Japanese people understand the term too.

I have also encountered this and not really known what to make of it. However after taking a quick look in 康熙字典 I notice that every character under 辵 is using either 辶 or 辵 I couldn't find a single 辶. As you say though, Taiwan is using the single dot version, though with their standard font it looks like a mix between 廴 and 辶. Also after taking a look in my 漢字源 that I have lying around, on every kanji using 辶 there was a 旧字体 version right below it using 辶.

The way I interpret this is that 辶 IS the older form of 辶 however as you say everyone isn't following the rules so it may appear that they are being used as two separate radicals. Much like 礻 is a simplification of　示 but both are still being used.

The 康熙字典 forms are simply what were considered orthodox at the time it was written, which is not the same as what's "traditional". I have no idea what you mean when you say the form in Taiwan is a mix of 廴 and 辶, but I can assure you it isn't that. Nor could 辶 and 辶 possibly be considered two different radicals. And nor is 礻 a simplification of 示. These are just variant ways of writing the same thing. The fact that China has adopted 礻 as the standard does not mean it has been "simplified". There's a difference between simplification and standardization.

I can't agree with you about the two dots version of 辶 being "older", if we're talking about 楷書 (the modern form of the characters, aka "regular script"). In fact, 鍾繇, who was one of the earliest proponents of 楷書 and who contributed greatly to its development, wrote it with only one dot. As did 王羲之, who came not long after. Go any earlier than them and you're either going to be looking at very cursive forms (草書), clerical script (隸書), or something even earlier (小篆, 戰國文字, etc.), as the regular script had not yet been developed. Granted, I think two, or even three dots was more common in clerical script, but that's likely because it developed as a shorthand for the full form seal characters, which always either contained the full form of 辵, or 行 as I mentioned earlier.

Edit: Actually, I believe that should be a 行 with a 止 at the bottom. Or maybe a 之. The two forms were really similar, maybe even variants themselves at the time.

Before I posted my last post I was considering adding that "unless you have information predating 康熙字典....", boy did I have to pay for electing not to include that line .

I think you misinterpret what I mean with simplification. When I said 礻 is a simplification of 示 I didn't mean that is was part of some effort to simplify the written language. Once I saw しめすへん written in such a way that the connection between 礻 and 示 was clear (basically it was 示 written in such a way that it almost looked like 礻), and after seeing that I assumed that was how 示 was simplified into　礻, not as part of a simplification effort, but as a natural evolution of the character. I admit that I don't know which one came first, maybe 礻 came first, but due to the popularization of 礻 (and due to the character I saw, that I mentioned before), I assumed as such.

About 康熙字典 as you say, what is written there is what was thought normal at the time, however I would have thought that since it shows alternate forms and even 篆書 (I think, not an expert), they would have shown alternate forms of a radical, which in other cases, it does indeed. But as you say one of the leading contributors used 辶 so the only thing I can do is blame my own ignorance and the fact that this piece of information is now readily available. I will instead counter this with a question: were 辶 and 辶 used in a way where one form was preferred over the other, or linked to specific characters, or were they simply two ways to write essentially the same thing?

What I said about Taiwan's 辶　looking like a mix with 廴 is stemmed from this, if that is too small to see clearly I'll have to resort so more insecure methods based on us having the same font. here. It's just an observation based on the font they're using, nothing to do with the actual 廴 radical.

Just thought I'd add as a final thing, even though 辶 and 辶 apparently were created at the same time, in modern materials 辶 is used as a simplified form and 辶 as a traditional form. As you have clearly stated this is not entirely correct if you look at history as a whole. However I think most modern "correct forms" aka 正字 are based on 康熙字典, probably because it's the biggest effort the standardize the characters, as far as I know anyway. If that is true that one could also say that anything before 康熙字典 is non-standard. Of course this doesn't make it correct to call 辶 the traditional form of 辶, but it's hardly surprising as most people don't know too much of the history of kanji, especially not stretching as far as alternate forms of characters predating 康熙字典.

Edit: Forgot to say, I didn't mean 辶 and 辶 as different radicals, rather as two forms of the same radical, just like 示 and 礻.

In 行書 calligraphy it's usually one dot as well.

Taishi Wrote:Before I posted my last post I was considering adding that "unless you have information predating 康熙字典....", boy did I have to pay for electing not to include that line .

Kangxi is downright recent compared to the stuff I work with.

Quote:I think you misinterpret what I mean with simplification. When I said 礻 is a simplification of 示 I didn't mean that is was part of some effort to simplify the written language. Once I saw しめすへん written in such a way that the connection between 礻 and 示 was clear (basically it was 示 written in such a way that it almost looked like 礻), and after seeing that I assumed that was how 示 was simplified into　礻, not as part of a simplification effort, but as a natural evolution of the character. I admit that I don't know which one came first, maybe 礻 came first, but due to the popularization of 礻 (and due to the character I saw, that I mentioned before), I assumed as such.

Yes, unfortunately the word "simplified" is not the best word, but it's what we have. I usually assume when talking about Chinese characters that when people say "simplified" they mean 簡體字, though what you mean is 簡化字 (or really even 異體字, though it's quite possible as you say that 礻 is a simplification/簡化 of 示.

By the way, I don't know the Japanese terms for what I'm talking about, so I'm using the Chinese ones. In case they're not the same, 簡體字 refers to the simplified characters used in China (as opposed to 正體字/繁體字 used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau). 簡化 literally means to to make simple, so it refers to simplification in a general sense, not specifically to the PRC standard.

Quote:About 康熙字典 as you say, what is written there is what was thought normal at the time, however I would have thought that since it shows alternate forms and even 篆書 (I think, not an expert), they would have shown alternate forms of a radical, which in other cases, it does indeed. But as you say one of the leading contributors used 辶 so the only thing I can do is blame my own ignorance and the fact that this piece of information is now readily available. I will instead counter this with a question: were 辶 and 辶 used in a way where one form was preferred over the other, or linked to specific characters, or were they simply two ways to write essentially the same thing?

Not "normal", but "orthodox". The idea was to include what scholars at the time considered to be the most "correct" forms of the characters, along with some commonly seen variants. Not in an effort to standardize, but to inform and to serve as a model for scholars. Of course, later in the Qing dynasty some people began to suspect that our whole understanding of how characters work was a load of crap, an idea that still meets with a lot of resistance today, and the 康熙 dictionary really isn't the place you want to go to do real 文字學 (philology) research because the information we have today goes unimaginably far beyond what they had access to at the time.

I can't really tell from your post, but it seems like you understood me to be saying that 鍾繇 was one of the contributors to the 康熙字典. He lived about 1500 years before it was written, so what I was saying is that he was one of the main contributors to the development of 楷書, which is the form of characters that has been in use for the past 1800 years (also called regular script). The regular script developed from the cursive (草書) and clerical (隸書) scripts, the former of which developed from the latter, which itself developed from seal script (篆書).

Quote:What I said about Taiwan's 辶　looking like a mix with 廴 is stemmed from this, if that is too small to see clearly I'll have to resort so more insecure methods based on us having the same font. here. It's just an observation based on the font they're using, nothing to do with the actual 廴 radical.

I understand what you mean. The squiggly vertical (versus the straighter one) is just another variant, and again both coexisted for a very long time before people started worrying with standardization. The squiggly one again preserves the older seal form a bit better, but really only as a hint at the original form rather than anything substantial. In fact, in that respect it reminds me of some of the 草書楷化 forms common in both the simplified Chinese and Japanese sets (such as 学, which is a 楷化 kai-ization of the cursive form of 學).

Quote:Just thought I'd add as a final thing, even though 辶 and 辶 apparently were created at the same time, in modern materials 辶 is used as a simplified form and 辶 as a traditional form.

Maybe if you're talking about Japanese this is the case, I don't know. In Chinese, 辶 is certainly the simplified (China) form, but in traditional you'll find either form, depending on the font being used. Sometimes the same book will use different fonts for different purposes, so you can even find both forms of the same character on the same page (as is the case on the first page of my copy of 《四書讀本》 published by 三民書局).

Mmm... You guys are real experts! I'm still wondering the same (shamefully down-to-earth) thing though: Take a thousand Japanese people and ask them to write "辿". Would you expect a majority of one-dots or two-dots?

Does it has to do with age (older people would maybe use more "traditional" forms?) Is it pure personal preference/education? Is there any possible stigmatization for writing something the "old way" or so (like maybe it looks more educated, or pretentious, or "Chinese"...?) or maybe in the contrary nobody ever pays any attention to this? By "old way" I mean like, the "eat" primitive as in 饅; the little dot in the "someone" primitive as in 躇; the old "altar" primitive as in "祓" etc. I know it means the same thing, but I wonder who generally goes with which and why.

Haha I guess it's a complex question XD Sorry!

My guess is that the average Japanese person doesn't care that much, and that you would tend to get the one-dot forms and new forms of radicals in handwriting. Most Japanese people aren't going to be writing obscure kanji that often anyway.

comeauch Wrote:I'm still wondering the same (shamefully down-to-earth) thing though

Nothing shameful about that. It's an interesting question, and the answer (if we can find it) is bound to be helpful to learners of Japanese. You shouldn't confuse "obscure" (which admittedly describes my field very well) with "worthwhile".

Unfortunately I'm in no place to answer your questions, just wanted to make an observation.

bflatnine Wrote:

JimmySeal Wrote:The same can be seen in Chinese. Traditional (by which I mean 繁体字) Chinese uses double dots, while Simplified Chinese uses single dots.

What are you basing this on? The standard in Taiwan is one dot. I'm fairly certain the same is true in Hong Kong.

I was basing this on my (rather limited) experience reading Taiwanese print material. I have to admit that having seen the two drop version in some Taiwanese books led me to believe that it was so in most Taiwanese text. I didn't realize that there's so much variation within the one country. For whatever it's worth, this is the breakdown of the Taiwanese books that I own:

Two drops:
Narnia books
犬夜叉 comics
涼風 comics
A novel called 神棍之遺失的記憶
The DVD box for 桃花小妹
A container of Dove body soap

One drop:
A book of Grimm Fairy tales (which uses a handwritten style font)
A Jay Chou lyric booklet

From the above (admittedly small) sample, it seems that more "serious" materials use two drops and the stuff for small children or pop culture use one.

Quote:Just curious about how "traditional" is used here, and in particular if that's how Japanese people understand the term too.

I would define "traditional" here as being whatever was the (de facto) standard in print material before a more recent writing reform. I think, as Yudan said, most Japanese people wouldn't care one way or the other, but would recognize that more rare kanji are written with the two drop form.

Quote:By the way, I don't know the Japanese terms for what I'm talking about, so I'm using the Chinese ones.

The Japanese terms are 旧字体 and 新字体, but those only refer to Japanese kanji. The Chinese terms would be used to talk about hanzi.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia description of the JISx0213:2004 revisions (which standardized non-joyo kanji as having 2 dots for the radical we're discussing) says that the revisions restored these characters to their kangxi forms.

bflatnine Wrote:... Just curious about how "traditional" is used here, and in particular if that's how Japanese people understand the term too.

For the Japanese, what English-speakers call simplified is the shinjitai (new character form) and traditional is the kyūjitai (old character form). The delimiter for the current meaning of these terms starts with the implementation of the Tōyō Kanji in 1946; it doesn't really take into account the older history of the characters.

JimmySeal Wrote:

bflatnine Wrote:

JimmySeal Wrote:The same can be seen in Chinese. Traditional (by which I mean 繁体字) Chinese uses double dots, while Simplified Chinese uses single dots.

What are you basing this on? The standard in Taiwan is one dot. I'm fairly certain the same is true in Hong Kong.

I was basing this on my (rather limited) experience reading Taiwanese print material. I have to admit that having seen the two drop version in some Taiwanese books led me to believe that it was so in most Taiwanese text. I didn't realize that there's so much variation within the one country. For whatever it's worth, this is the breakdown of the Taiwanese books that I own:

Two drops:
Narnia books
犬夜叉 comics
涼風 comics
A novel called 神棍之遺失的記憶
The DVD box for 桃花小妹
A container of Dove body soap

One drop:
A book of Grimm Fairy tales (which uses a handwritten style font)
A Jay Chou lyric booklet

From the above (admittedly small) sample, it seems that more "serious" materials use two drops and the stuff for small children or pop culture use one.

In print material, it may be a bit more common to see two dots. That is the case among the books I have at arms' reach. But I have a book on Classical Chinese grammar, maybe a dozen Classical Chinese readers, a book on Old Chinese phonology, a few dictionaries, etc., all of which use the one-dot version. These were published in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, and I also have examples from each using two dots.

It isn't so much that there's "variation within the one country", but that fonts vary, and most foundries aren't interested in conforming to any one country's standard (which would be pointless anyway, given the size and spread of the Chinese-speaking/reading diaspora), but in creating pleasing, readable typefaces. The choice of one or two dots is an aesthetic choice more than anything.

I'd be willing to bet that most people write with only one dot, regardless of whether the character is common or not, though I don't have data to support that. In fact, I find it odd that Japanese people would write the same component in two different ways depending on how common it is.

Quote:

Quote:By the way, I don't know the Japanese terms for what I'm talking about, so I'm using the Chinese ones.

The Japanese terms are 旧字体 and 新字体, but those only refer to Japanese kanji. The Chinese terms would be used to talk about hanzi.

It can be assumed that I'm talking about 漢字 in this thread, regardless of how you pronounce it, unless I specify otherwise. When I say something like 簡體字 I'm referring to the characters that are standard in China, and when I say 簡化字 I'm talking about characters that have been simplified in general. I'm not going to use Japanese terms that I don't fully understand when I can perfectly well use Chinese and English to get my meaning across clearly. As I believe I've demonstrated, it's never as simple as we'd like it to be, so I'd need to understand the history and meaning behind 舊字體 and 新字體 before I'd feel comfortable using them.

bflatnine Wrote:I can't really tell from your post, but it seems like you understood me to be saying that 鍾繇 was one of the contributors to the 康熙字典.

After reading what I wrote I see how it could be interpreted that way, but no, what I meant was " But as you say one of the leading contributors (of 楷書) used 辶".

Indeed in my examples I use Japanese as an example since that's what I'm most familiar with, and I probably couldn't make many examples of 簡化字 with any kind of certainty.

It seems I only used one Japanese-specific word though: しめすへん which is the name for 礻/示 which I typed out since the actual form of the radical was relevant. Maybe it makes more sense to you if I type it as 示偏.

As several of you have said, using one of the other really makes no difference, and most people probably don't pay it much mind. However I think, in Japanese at least, that for 常用表外 characters, with a few exceptions, 辶 is considered correct. And with gdaxeman's clarification there is nothing wrong in considering it as such. This however does not necessarily mean that 辶 is wrong, but just that the other form is preferred. I even think that in tests like 漢字検定 you still get points if you use 辶. So in the end, I don't think it's something to be too fussed about, especially if you know the story behind it .