Doug Ewell wrote: > And if you think that's bad, you should have seen the ones that got rejected -- > special "emphasized" Hangul for writing the names of North Korean dictators
Not so outlandish as it may first appear. When Egyptian hieroglyphs get encoded in Unicode, I would not be surprised to see special characters for the cartouched names of pharaohs (for pharaohs read dictators). And in China, historically the personal names of emperors (for emperors read dictators) have been tabooed (some dynasties, e.g. Han, Song and Qing, more than others), meaning that if you had to write a character that happened to be part of the emperor's personal name, then you either substituted another character (synonym or homophone as appropriate), or wrote the character with the last stroke omitted. This later practice was prevalent during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). For example, the character hong �� [U+5F18] is often found written without the final dot on the bottom right in texts dating from and after the reign of the Qianlong emperor (r.1736-1795), whose personal name was hongli ��� [U+5F18, U+66C6]. Whilst an editorial decision may be made to transcribe all instances of the tabooed form of �� [U+5F18] as �� [U+5F18] for a given text, because these tabooed forms are so useful for dating purposes, textual scholars often have to refer to the tabooed form as distinct from the canonical form (I myself have had to do so, and have been reduced to using awkward formulae such as "the character �� with a missing final stroke"). I was thinking that perhaps there might be a need for a new Unicode block - "CJK Taboo Replacement Characters", but having just looked at the chart for CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B <http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U20000.pdf> (scary reading for you font developers), I notice that the tabooed form of hong is encoded at U+2239E, as is at least one other taboo-form that I checked (U+248E5). Andrew West
