A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode

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/

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.

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.

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....

> The original character (𡚴) was not added to JIS or Unicode until much later and doesn't display on most sites for me Why didn't they simly replace the original bad one? > nine hundred pages. Imagine tracking down a single character without a page reference Not that hard to imagine, OCR existed back then?