On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Kenneth Whistler wrote: > Then in Extension B there are many, many weird and wonderful > candidates for strangest CJK characters. Some of my > personal favorites include:
Looks like they are all attempts to create modern reflexes of characters that never made it past the seal script stage ~2,000 years ago. > U+26B99 > U+20137 Neither of these two are in the _Kangxi Zidian_ or _Hanyu Da Zidian_--what are they? They seem to be the fault? of CNS 11643. > U+20572 Ancient form of U+96E8, yu3 'rain'. Looks like it, too! But U+96E8 is more concise. > U+2069C Ancient form of U+20698, tao1, a basket for feeding cows. But this one seems like an redundancy--certainly, neighoring U+206A1 would the closest attempt at creating a modern reflex that mimics the appearance of the ancient form, but also neighboring U+20698 looks more reasonable as a modern reflex that looks modern. U+2069C just seems like an in-between form that is neither here nor there, although _Hanyu Da Zidian_ does have it. It seems like critics prefer U+20698--both _Kangxi Zidian_ and _Hanyu Da Zidian_ include it, as well as a North Korean character set, and CNS 11643, whereas U+206A1 is backed only by CNS 11643. I wonder why these three were not unified--surely, they are just three attempts to convert a dead character into a modern form that are within the range of font or glyph variation. I think I know the answer is source separation, but that would not prevent U+2069C... > U+2696E Ancient form of U+7232, wei2 'to make'; wei4 'on behalf of'. This doesn't look like it is the direct ancestor of U+7232 like the 'rain' case above, but an ancient form that lost out to the ancient form which was the ancestor of U+7232. > With such genetic defects, one would have expected such > characters to die out long ago, but Unicode has brought them > back to life. Like U+2069C, which was born maybe 15-20 years ago... > And of course, there is always the miraculous proliferation > of turtles... ;-) Look through the 'tiger' radical section of the SIP and there's a dozen or so used as signs and flag signals just by the _Tian Di Hui_ organization. I suppose some of them are technically logos... Mind sharing a list of those turtles? Thomas Chan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
