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  • Hacker News
  • Is anyone using these characters now for anything? No youth language or online slang using it?
    by panzi
  • There's some fan fiction that treats the characters as names of ghosts and comes up with back stories and visualizations for them (the article links to a compilation, but it's 403ing for me). Nothing mainstream though.
    by decimalenough
  • (2018)

    I've seen YouTube videos on this topic before.

    > The original character (𡚴) was not added to JIS or Unicode until much later and doesn't display on most sites for me.

    It's from Unicode version 3.1 (published 2001) so this is surprising.

    by zahlman
  • See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Book_from_the_Sky (a 1988 art project based on intentionally making up ghost characters by hand and printing a whole book with nonexistent but aesthetically plausible Chinese characters). Amusingly, Wikipedia mentions that over a dozen of them (out of about 4,000) were later found to accidentally exist!
    by schoen
  • Xu Bing has a book that consists entirely of invented characters:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Book_from_the_Sky

    by xelxebar
  • This would make a great tattoo, as a pun on people getting Kanji character tattoos without being able to read Kanji.
    by eproxus
  • Fascinating. But, I guess it's better to have superfluous invalid characters than missing real ones.
    by sedatk
  • Well, vast swaths of the Kangxi dictionary (which serves as "sources" for probably most of the CJK characters) are such "ghost" characters as described in the article...

    The peculiar properties of CJK characters and the philosophy (apparently the Japanese did not like Unicode's tendencies towards Aristotelian essentialism) under which they were implemented in Unicode probably singlehandedly forced unicode to expand beyond the BMP....

    by hnfong
  • What is the rationale to the unifying direction of changes in Unicode?
    by zx8080
  • The Han unification probably was about fitting CJK into the 16 bits aka BMP. It was a blunder indeed.
    by RicoElectrico
  • > The peculiar properties of CJK characters and the philosophy (apparently the Japanese did not like Unicode's tendencies towards Aristotelian essentialism) under which they were implemented in Unicode probably singlehandedly forced unicode to expand beyond the BMP....

    Note that Han Unification has a history predating Unicode, and the Unicode work very much followed on from that.

    The most notable is CCCII, developed in Taiwan in the early 80s, and then standardised in various places.

    That's not to say that it hasn't been controversial (it has!), nor to say that it hasn't caused problems (it has!), but it's also unfair to say that it's just Unicode doing its own special thing.

    by gsnedders
  • > apparently the Japanese did not like Unicode's tendencies towards Aristotelian essentialism

    Do you mean Han Unification? I.e. that conceptually equivalent characters which are written differently in Japan and China received only a single unicode code-point, and are rendered the Chinese way by default on most computers?

    by CodesInChaos
  • (2018)

    Major previous discussions:

    110 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637375

    130 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24951130

    180 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095502

    by layer8
  • It occurs to me that we can use 彊 to mean "a completely unknown concept that cannot be named". For example if you ask, "when Cthulhu rises from its slumber, what is thefirst thing it will do? Probably it will 彊.
    by gweinberg
  • This sounds like a SCP entry

    Perhaps the meaning of this character is sealed in some vault

    by nextaccountic
  • So www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/mu.html
    by mkehrt
  • More mundanely, you could also use it as a marker character, given that nobody except for sneaky little QA hobbitses will ever use it in their input.
    by 9dev
  • That's not on my keyboard... Can I just stick with "ineffable"?
    by arcanemachiner
  • I think there’s evidence found for the origin of “彁” as the result of a poor scan of a newspaper article. Look up “彁 新聞” to find some japanese sources about this.
    by erjiang
  • The article mentions "an example of 彁 mistakenly used in a digitized Taisho newspaper due to a faded printing of 彊", but to me that implies the symbol already existed before then.
    by gs17
  • Ghost characters reveal something about the joint semantic and phonetic nature of most Chinese characters. I know 彁 isn't real: but it still insists on a pronunciation: ka in Japanese, (gē or gé Mandarin). And it hints at meaning: bowed weapon, sound, elder brother; but your guess is as good as mine!
    by retrac
  • Before that, there was the case of ÿ and Ÿ in the base IBM character set (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ÿ). The former exists in a handful of proper nouns in French and Hungarian (as in about five proper nouns), but only as a y with a diæresis, which would normally be handled with a Unicode modifier symbol. It is also used in a couple of endangered languages in South America, which would not have influenced the character getting in to a PC character set. It is thought that possibly it was supposed to represent the Dutch "ij" character, but apparently that is never written as "ÿ" in print. Ÿ seems to not be used by any language.
    by tengwar2
  • > Ÿ seems to not be used by any language.

    Surely those aforementioned non-initial cases would sometimes find themselves in a piece of all-uppercase text? You'd have found such things in print media even before the advent of computers.

    by mostlylurks
  • > but only as a y with a diæresis

    á (á) is also an 'a' with a diacritical acute accent. If you mean that ÿ should not have a precomposition in Unicode, well, why not, especially if it really is used in "a handful of proper nouns in French and Hungarian".

    Remember, the reason we have combining marks is that that is in fact how many of these characters were composed in actual use, especially with typewriters. Heck, 1966 US-ASCII / ECMA-6 (1985), section 5, describes the use of backspace/overstrike in US-ASCII for composition of such characters! That comes from typewriter use. And that's where compose-key sequences generally come from, too.

    So it's not at all surprising that given that ÿ has _some_ use, therefore a) it is a valid glyph to construct with combining diaeresis, and b) that it has a precomposed codepoint in Unicode.

    by cryptonector
  • Great, so they added Ÿ but not n̈, making it very difficult to write music reviews.

    (Not sure how the latter will render in your browser).

    by pseudohadamard
  • I've seen Dutch comics for kids which use ÿ instead of ij. E.g.: "mÿn". In typical comic font (which is closer to handwriting), it looks similar to ij, but it's clearly ÿ.
    by WhyNotHugo
  • The author Paul McCann (polm) is one of my favourite programmers out there!

    He’s done awesome work in the Japanese NLP space over the last decade which has really helped me in my language learning projects.

    He maintains a mecab (Japanese tokenizer) wrapper for Python [0], has a book on Japanese NLP written for English speakers [1] and also worked on Spacy at one point [2].

    [0] https://github.com/polm/fugashi [1] https://www.japanesenlp.com/ [2] https://spacy.io/

    by joshdavham