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.

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!

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?"

Last edited by JimmySeal (2012 October 13, 2:12 pm)

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.

Last edited by Taishi (2012 October 13, 11:03 pm)

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.

Last edited by Taishi (2012 October 14, 4:30 am)

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.

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.

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last edited by JimmySeal (2012 October 14, 11:47 am)

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.

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.

Last edited by bflatnine (2012 October 14, 12:25 pm)