On Dec 24, 2003, at 1:10 PM, Elaine Keown wrote:
I hesitate to ask this, but what is the current opinion on how many Han characters there are?
Properly speaking, nobody knows. My older estimate would have been on the order of 80,000, but it's clear that this is way too small. Unicode currently has 70,000+ encoded ideographs with another ten thousand or so coming down the pike. Even allowing for unification errors in the standard, there are well over 100,000. My own dictum on the subject is, "No list of Han ideographs is ever complete." (And this isn't just a matter of people making up new ones. We've got a huge extant literature extending over thousands of years to look through for actual ideographs which have been used in the past. The problem is akin to trying to exhaustively list every English word.)
======== John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/
