@@danieldronzek8616 Mojibake ("character transformation") is the garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding.
I’m a font designer in Japan. Sometimes designers make mistakes when putting together a letter. These days they get caught when checking for mistakes and the vectors get edited, but in the old days before computer aided design it was much easier for things to slip through the cracks, then all of a sudden - a new kanji has accidentally been invented. Kanji are much easier to design in my opinion because once you make the radicals you can piece them together like a jigsaw, though modification is still needed.
For a moment, at your "these days they get caught", I thought you meant the designers rather than the mistakes. Like, they're doing it sneakily😂😂 Oops.
japanese font names be like a-otf shin go pro fot-chiaro std b dfp(insert chinese characters here that i cant even read lol)w(insert your font thiccness here)
That 'Jisc' logo is wrong - it's for a United Kingdom not-for-profit organisation that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education and research and not the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee, FYI
That may be true, but in Japanese usage, that character has nothing to do with a river anymore. It basically just means "China" ("kanji" (漢字) literally just means "Chinese characters"). Which of course just highlights one of the big problems with assigning meanings to Japanese kanji based on their elements or appearance, because they weren't even developed as part of Japanese to begin with (they were basically just -stolen- ..ahem.. adopted from Chinese), even in Chinese their meanings had sometimes diverged from what they once were, and on top of that the ways in which they were adapted to Japanese sometimes had very little to do with their Chinese origins or meanings (for example, many were originally used phonetically in Japanese, because they had a particular pronunciation, not because of a particular meaning, and then came to develop their own unique Japanese meanings from those usages).
Every language on earth have words that swayed from their original meaning. It is like saying learning Latin prefixes and suffixes would not help your to understand English, which is not entirely true. Radicals can hint the meaning of a word to a certain degree, and knowing the backstory behind a word gives you a better understanding and chance of sticking it in your head.
@@georgedeng8646 And the Han people came from the area around the Han River, thus the water radical. (Okay, I am going to have to edit this comment, because people decided to ignore the context of what I was saying. The Han people, who existed as developing cultural and ethnic groups for hundreds and thousands of years before the formation of the Han kingdom, later considered the Han Kingdom as their unifiying ethnic and cultural origin, and took their name from it. The clarification of my original comment was to explain why the character for "Kan"/"Han" has a water radical, not to explain the totality of the political and cultural history, and for that matter, the difference between political and cultural history, in a UA-cam comment.
the characters 漢 and 治 both feature the same radical 氵because they originated as names of two ancient rivers. So yes, they are water related, but over the ages they took on more significant meanings that surpassed their original definition
Did you mean to use a different character for ji? Because the two you wrote there are pronounced kan and ji, but the second one isn't used to write the word kanji, but rather 字 is.
Then no one could make fun of you for it being a really funny word you didn't know! Or, you could tell people what it means. Either way, awesome tat idea!
Well, Hawaiian is a completely language, and the Hawaiian alphabet has 13 letters, and we have 12 kanji here. If we decide to replace the letter P with two ‘okina (apostrophes) then we now have a 12-letter Hawaiian alphabet. Then you could replace the letters with the kanji. The result is a relex of a completely language. That means that it’s certainly viable to create a language that isn’t a relex, using just these 12 kanji as letters.
@@tovarishchfeixiao I know how kanji are supposed to work, but I’m saying that you could create a cursed alphabet using those symbols as the letters and then spell the name of the eldritch being OP was talking about with that alphabet
政治 more precisely means “Politics” rather than “government”, with 治 kind of meaning “management”/“solve”/“rule” etc, which is actually related to water too because in very ancient times the leaders are the ones who manage the river, which the community is built upon.
yep, in ancient China, 治水 meaning manage flood. There is theory that Chinese civilization transformed from tribe to form countries, specifically because of collective need to manage/prevent floods.
@testxxxx123 Sweet. Thanks for the knowledge man !!! I believe that theory 1000% !¡! I find it so believable because of : 🅰️ : The sheer size of China [even minus all modern China] 🅱️ : The remarkable Cohesion the entire country had during almost all of its history and dynasties !¡! Qin, Han... Tang... Song ... Yuan, Ming, Qing. It's remarkable how vast and cohesive China remained throughout such a long historical span. I never thought about it, or laid attention to it, but now that I have seen your comment it really starts making sense to me !!!¡¡¡!!!
Nonsense. The etymological dictionary says 治 was just originally the name of some river, and just by accident it was pronounced the same as the word for "to govern", so the person decided to reuse the character.
@@thisismycoolnickname Yes, that makes more sense, since that's how it usually goes for kanji. A Chinese character represent a word, and then the Japanese started using the same character to represent a Japanese word which sounded similar to the Chinese one, no matter the actual Chinese meaning.
@@Renwoxing13Another theory, mind you, is that civilization is built on agriculture, agriculture on grain, and the primary grain which built Chinese civilization was rice, an incredibly finnicky and stubborn crop which in premodern times would involve the cooperation of many kinds of tradesmen, as opposed to grains like corn and wheat, which a lone farmer can grow with some effort and a family can easily grow, with no need for the cooperation of a larger community. This tracks with other cultures and civilizations that either grew crops that required more extensive terraforming and irrigation or inhabited areas where farming in general necessitated such measures (eg high altitude mountain slopes, which require both leveling/terracing and creative irrigation, similar to growing rice in general); as compared to cultures which grew easier crops in easier terrain. Rice and extreme terrain encourage collectivism because each person must contribute to the plight of a farmer while each individual relies on the community to fulfill their most basic need, while other grains and easy terrain encourage individualism because each farmer's farm belongs to him (to some extent, in theory and in primitive society; serfdom seems to be a nearly inevitable consequence of individualism) and the community relies on the individual.
There's a song in Taiko no Tatsujin by LeaF called "彁 (Ka)". It's this insane glitch song with multiple time signatures, almost like a "ghost in the machine", like the ghost letter in its title. Also, the beat map goes completely crazy with beats overlapping each other constantly.
There is also one song by a Doujin circle called Diao ye zong. The kanji seems like a cool character since it have no meanings or like a glitch in the system.
The theory I've always heard is that 彁 was copied from a blurry photocopy of 埼玉自彊会 "Saitama Cooperative Organization" from a 1923 newspaper. I guess thats speculation.
Kanji 1 in the name contains one element of (Ka), and kanji 4 contains another part of it, too. What do they mean individually, and could it perhaps give it a new meaning?
@@victoralexandervinkenes9193 埼 means “headlands”, 彁 doesn’t mean anything since it’s a ghost kanji. If it had a meaning it would probably have something to do with curves, since it has the 弓 radical.
In our language, Urdu, there is one character that appears in the regular alphabet, is taught in primary school, etc but is only used in the spelling of a single word.
From the analysis of a Vietnamese Nôm scholar, the character 彁 looks like a combination of 弓 and 哥. 弓 mostly stand for a bow, or to strive for something. 哥 is usually used for adressing someone who is male which is older, or same age as you. However he suspects that 哥 is actually the duplication of 可, meaning worthy, or great ambition, or (able to) achive. Duplications is often used in traditional Chinese to exaggerate or emphasize the meaning of the character. So 彁 could means to strive for something unfathomably great, something that is of great meanings, or extreme worth. Do take this with a pinch of salt though.
In the same way that 木 is a tree, 林 is a woods, and 森 is a forest. And you can combine it to 森林 to mean something like woodlands, a region that has many woods or forests, or just an even greater variety of forest. Japanese has this duplication too, and in current use.
Thanks for making common sense connections! Many languages lost, many North American tribes wiped out, do not let people say that somthing is nothing, when in the back our minds have a good idea. Memories from 3 generations back are in our heads today, and this is recently published in specially written psychology journals that do computer science and memory studies. Peace.
Hanzi (Chinese Traditional and Simplified), Kanji (Japanese), and Hanja (Korean Han characters) all originate from 5th century Chinese characters. Many characters lost or changed meaning along the way.
Small correction: Kanji are ultimately Chinese characters, and it would be more accurate to say that the Kangxi Dictionary contains 40,000 Chinese Characters and not Kanji, as #1 only a small portion of those characters are used as kanji (and to be honest in normal Chinese communication) and #2 the pronounciation and definitions given in the dictionary are for Chinese and not Japanese.
Yeah typical Japanophiles always downplay the Chinese origins of things. Origami, Kanji, Bonsai, calligraphy - all ripped off from the Chinese but they act like they invented them.
Yep. A Chinese person can read Japanese Kanji and understand about 75% of the meaning while a Japanese person would only understand about 20% of Traditional Chinese characters. Tokyo in Japanese is pronounced: 東 To 京 Kyo , in Mandarin Chinese 東 Dong 京 Jing. Although the pronunciation is different, the meaning is still the same, literally "Eastern capital."
Or he flubbed the pronunciation of "Kangxi". But you're probably right. That said, the Japanese kanji and Chinese hanzi aren't exactly the same. Both linguistic communities modified them.
I think for 99% of population using Kanji, at least half of the ~50,000 Kanji characters are never learnt or seen in their lives. There were popular TV shows in China where teenagers compete each other to pronounce and explain random "fossil" characters. My theory is that people just keep inventing new characters back in the days when they couldn't find one to mean what they had in mind, because there wasn't a widely used dictionary to keep track of those. Then they end up like niche memes that no one understands in a few years.
I imagine that such invention of characters has stopped in the modern day simply because Unicode doesn't have the abilities to do such things. (Unless someone wants to hijack the seventeen characters from 13430 to 13440 for use in a completely different script.) At least alphabets have the ability to make shit up, like the term “alfgontrausnamatation”.
@@Blue-Maned_Hawk except it does, but few system (if any) actually implement that and would just show the raw string. Kinda like how old phones would display skin tone variation of an emoji with the original one followed by a skin tone square.
A newspaper from 1923 was thought to have the character 彁 in the expression 埼玉自彁會，but the page was a smaller reprint, and it was later revealed to be 彊（variant of 強）as in 自彊會。
@dacueba-games calm your tits. No one is gonna get fired. These channels produce a lot of videos month, heck you just watched a video about how A GOVERNMENT run department that was tasked with making a list of all the special characters used in a countries language and how in searching for the thousands of individual, hyper localised to a region, characters used to refer to anything and everything, they made mistakes sifting through who knows how many documents and books to find each character. In Japan, the katakana for the same thing can look completely different from one part of the country to the next. So yes, the JISC made mistake and a couple of writers and researchers on a UA-cam channel who are likely working on multiple projects at a time will also make mistakes. The only thing that will most likely happen at best is that they are gonna acknowledge the mistake in the next "Ooops, are all the things we were wrong about in all our videos from the last video we made telling the things we wrong about :-P" video and show what the correct logo is. And besides!!!! Just because the logo was wrong doesn't mean the information they gave is incorrect. It's not like all of a sudden the tech support JISC in England is gonna be get requests to figure out what the Kanji for a bruised banana is for a hyper specific village in a remote part of North eastern Japan just because HaI used their logo instead of the JISC in Japan's logo.
@@dacueba-games I too am unable to identify humor. Please imagine, or ask chat gtp for, a very long and unnecessary text where I explain the thing to you, you obviously already know, starting with the plot of the thing you've just seen.
There's actually a full 51 hiragana and katakana characters. 3 are no longer used in modern Japanese, but do appear in historical tests (and in some fonts); 𛀆/𛄠 (yi), 𛀁/𛄡 (ye), 𛄟/𛄢 (wu). Another 2 of the remaining 48 are almost never used except in specific circumstances and have alternative kana combinations to make the sound instead; ゐ/ヰ (wi), ゑ/ヱ (we). These are known as the gojuon, "the fifty sounds". The 51st kana is ん/ン (n) and was only created in the early 1900s to replace む/ム (mu) in words that make the "u" sound silent when spoken aloud. Edit: And then there's "small kana", but that's an easier situation; smaller versions of the "y" sounds, vowel sounds, and the "tsu" sound.
I'm on Android, the yi-ye-wu characters appear corrupted 😅 Edit: Came back on Windows Chrome and except for the first ye character (𛀁) the rest are still corrupt
wait i didn't know that ん/ン is a recent conscious invention, i just assumed it was a funny little phonetic quirk of Japanese that of all consonants only n existed on its own
There is a fundamental mistake in the explanation : You only look at the Japanese side of the story, and totally forget that the "Sinograms" or Chinese Characters are used in Simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Japanese and even Korean To summerize, I worked 15 years ago on how to display "Sinograms" on mobile fone, and managed to have a paper copy of the Unicode characters list, from 0x0000 to 0xFFFF. The whole book is more thick than a Chinese dictionary.... So the Sinograms part runs from 0x4E00 to 0x9FFF ( 20 992 Possible characters) and it pretends to encode ALL Sinograms, and also "Japanese / Korean own creation" in it, so that a Full Unicode compatible font can display full Chinese, Japanese and Korean text (I will call it CJK to simplify) So, if one particular character exist in ALL CJK languages, than it will get one common code. Example 0x4E00 is "一" meaning "one" in all three CJK language, and has the same meaning. But some time a characters has the same meaning in ALL CJK languages, but has some graphical difference (due to simplification or local practice, sometime it is very subtile), it still use different code. A very good example is the character meaning "To Say" 0x8AAA "說", this is the Trad. Chinese form, for simp. Chinese it is simplified as 0x8BF4 "说" by reducing the "Speak" radical on the left, and in Japanese it is 0x8AAC "説" as the two stroke on the top right corner goes inward in stead of outward One last category is Japanese / Korean local variant, and the best example is the character "Dragon" : If you start with the Japanese JIS standard, you will get 0x7ADC "竜", this is the Japanese style simplification of the Trad Chinese it is 0x9F8D "龍", and some old Japanese people may know that. but the Mainland Chinasimplification 0x9F99 "龙" is totally unknown to Japanese people. All this to say that the 12 characters you listed are of 90% chance obsolete or rarely use old Chinese characters, or use only in some historical people name, like the last character of the 1st row is part of the name of a lady in Chinese mythology, Chang Er "嫦娥" , who fleed to the moon after drinking an immortal elixir. As the story is not know in Japan, no reason the JIS encode this 2 characters. Another fun fact is the whole Sinograms area in the Unicode is ordered in the old Chinese dictionary way: by the number if strock of the radical in traditional Chinese, then the number of stokes of the remaining part. Now a day (not much) young people know how to find a word in a paper Chinese dictionary :)
wrong radical bro, 嫦娥 chang-e is written with "女"for female and not "虫" for bug as shown in the video, so the 12 characters listed are probably completely obsolete...
@@hamsterfloat That's what they did for those 12. If they were old or obsolete Chinese characters, they would have been found much, much faster. That would be one of the first places they looked
The character "治" (zhì) in "政治" (zhèngzhì), meaning government, originally means "to stop a flood." The ability to stop a flood signifies the capacity to organize a large group of people to work together on a project, hence the connotation of governance. The first king of the Xia Dynasty is said to be an engineer who stopped the Yellow River from flooding, as recounted in the famous tale of 大禹治水 (Dà Yǔ Zhì Shuǐ). The character "漢" (hàn) means Chinese because the Han Dynasty is considered the golden era of ancient China. The Han Dynasty was named after the Han River (漢江, Hàn Jiāng), which was in turn named after the Milky Way (星漢/河漢, Xīng Hàn/Hé Hàn), a "river in the sky." Therefore, both of these characters originally have meanings related to water.💦
back when i was still early in learning Japanese, i genuinely thought that was how asian languages worked and was scared that id always need a unicode dictionary on me XD . luckly now i know how hiragana/katakana work
@@Archchill The joke aside, Chinese is usually typed with a romanised spelling system called Pinyin, and then you can choose the words from the list of Kanji shown. Japanese words works similarly by inputting Kana instead of Pinyin.
Pro Tip: Learning Katakana and Hiragana alone can be very helpful when you wanna play japanese only games. Many words are simply japanized english words. For example, if you have a racing game : グランプリ is Gu ra n Pu Ri.. Grand Prix.
Localized loanwords ahoy! Sometimes the developer intentionally chose to use the foreign word as-is. Best example: "anime" is a _double_ loanword, first borrowed from the English word "animation", then borrowed back but with a different, new meaning.
The oldest one of the Japanese written langauge evolved from Traditional Chinese. They even look the same and have similar meanings. This effect orginates from the 华夏文化圈(chinese culture circle), where chinese culture got exported to other countries around it during ancient times (as China was very powerful and influential in East Asia, esp during the Tang and Song dynasties).
Are you sure that means "chinese culture circle"? Because I know a few of these characters myself and I'm pretty sure the first two characters mean ""glowing summer".
@@explosion1972华 as in 华文的文。 You are right that 夏 stands for summer. In this context however, 华夏 stands for China / Chinese 文化代表culture. 圈 is… well circle Where did you get the glowing part from? lol
@@htrowii1090 According to additional research(=google) of my own, you are right. About the glowing part - either my translation mistake or the meaning has changed over the course of several millennia.
More on the Chinese side perspective of these mystery characters: Past dynasties of China have used different sets of characters and they were translated into newer characters as history progresses. A recent example would be the creation of simplified chinese by the chinese communist party, which created a new set of characters with DIFFERENT radicals (before that there were simplified chinese characters used in local regions but they still follow a set of rules (六書造字法).) and the simplification of Chinese hanji (which happened much after kangxi dictionary) might have created new unicode characters. As implicated by the original post, simplified chinese, traditional chinese and japanese kanji can share similarities, but some words are coded with different codes. The Hanji we use in daily lives are very limited, some that are translated from previous sets of characters might have became redundant, irrelevant and have lost their meaning, transposable as it is, most didnt made it into the computer display codes. Buddhism has continuously has a huge impact in both China and Japan. There is proof of trading and interaction of the now Chinese and India regions especially after the Han dynasty where great expeditions were made. And particularly in Tong dynasty, Japan has frequent visits to China to trade, and also to learn the Buddhism of China. Thus, Buddhism was also impactful in Japan dating back until (if im not mistaken) the Sengoku era, where warlords suppressed Buddhism organisations and focused more on Japan’s own religions for coherence by nationalism, which they call 大和魂. China’s monks might have translated Hindu’s Buddhism scripts into Chinese characters for easier pronunciation and spreading the religion. Therefore, the “mysterious characters” might have no particular meaning because they were the Chinese pronunciation for the Sanskrit Buddhism scripts. As I am aware, aside from the 12 mysterious characters that made into the unicode, there might be much more of them that didnt make the cut because of irrelevancy. So these are my possible theories from the Sino-perspective. I am ethically Chinese and could read Chinese, but I could’ve made mistakes so these are just possible theories.
Thanks for that! Being an engine nut I know about JIS screws but never realized that was only one specific spec they set and rather a system of standardizing everything, language included. That blew my mind. I never thought to look any deeper than my existing knowledge of JIS fasteners.
@@goosenotmaverick1156it's the equivalent of ISO, the International Standards Organization but for Japan. A lot of JIS standards are equivalent to ISO ones. There's standards for everything you can think of
The original meanings of the words "漢" and 跟"治" are strongly related to water. "漢" originally meant the Milky Way, but this word was used by Liu Bang as the name of the country. "治" originally meant Hydraulic engineering. Later, the meaning was expanded, and its modern meaning is management.
And my personal guess is, out of all the possible words for it, the one that has something to do with water got picked because water is a common metaphor of people, who when gathered can push things.
Props to the writers on this one for not padding out the video with unhelpful or unrepresentative kanji examples to appear more knowledgeable about the writing system. This was pretty good. Yall have done better than like 99% of the channels out there who have made videos about kanji with zero clue what they're talking about
@@kakahass8845 Definitely part of it, yeah. I've got a bone to pick. People on youtube who make language content who don't actually know very much about Japanese have an annoying tendency to exoticize kanji while at the same time bemoan their continued use. It's usually the same handful of points regurgitated. 鬱 being too complicated (bonus if they use the dragons in flight character to make a point of how complicated characters are), "three trees makes a forest", confusion about onyomi vs kunyomi, kana being a "solution" to kanji, "one character = one word", 生 having too many readings, etc. Specs of trivia that don't represent how kanji function individually, don't adequately explain how they're actually are used in the orthography, yet are repeated endlessly and cited for other people's videos on the topic. Whenever I meet someone who's interested but maybe doesn't know much about the Japanese language or kanji themselves, these are often the only things they know, which really sucks, I think. It leads to learners just starting out having this expectation that kanji are really scary and complicated and nonsensical, and your average person receiving an over-exoticized view of not just the language, but the culture too, with the implication that it is entirely inaccessible without dedicating ones life to study. The fact that the writers here decided to just leave most the trivia and the cruft out, intentionally or not, makes this like one of the most "normal" videos about kanji I've ever seen. For an example of the complete opposite, Name Explain released a video somewhat recently that was pretty terrible on all these points. Thank you for reading my essay
@@dozyoteThe whole thing about kanji looking like it would take a lifetime seems like obvious nonsense to me. I know some Traditional Chinese, and it takes a year or two of decent part-time instruction and flashcards to learn enough characters to read a newspaper. And that is _without_ either Simplified Chinese or kana to help!
It’s important to note the difference between “radicals” and components of characters though they often overlap. Radicals are how things are organized in the dictionary and don’t always carry meaning in a given character. Components are a more reliable way of parsing for meaning or pronunciation
The second character from the left in the bottom row is a Chinese character that only exists when talking about the extra month that sometimes gets inserted into the lunar calendar - when you add the extra month you just repeat one of the months and add that symbol. When researching the Chinese Lunar Calendar I asked several Chinese people what the character was and they had no idea. Took quite a lot of internet digging but then I figured it out! Anyway it’s probably a holdover from when Kanji were adopter from Chinese.
@@htrowii1090Could be a lesser known variant character. The 王 radical when used in characters like 球 is actually supposed to be a 玉, so it is possible someone following the archaic rule without properly consulting etymology might use 玉 instead of 王 which is the correct element even when accounting for etymology.
Its worth noting that the JIS standard even misses a bunch. Adobe-Japan1-7 (they defacto font standard), includes about 14644 kanji, over double the JIS X 0213 standard. Including characters like 髙 which is fairly common in names.
To understand, remember China was a bunch of states prior to unification. And after unification there was regionalism, and different periods of splitting. 合久必分，分久必合。It is within periods of that, and in placesz you have special characters that reflect an area's vestigial languages or local dialects. And in places like Korea, Japan and Vietnam, they have their own words. And so it is not surprising there are such old words.
The element 哥 is most likely meant to be read phonetically as "ka" (Mandarin: "ge"), as its literal meaning "elder brother" is virtually never employed for constructing new characters. And the element 弓 is obviously the radical "bow", used for archery-related words. So the meaning could be something like an archery-related sound effect, either "kaa..." (creaking of string being pulled) or "ka!" (twang of arrow let loose). But of course, Japanese manga has probably already assigned stock sound effects to these actions, so we'd need to find some aspect of the archery process that does not yet have an assigned sound.
The sound of slightly adjusting the bolts on a compound bow to change the strength because it's been a while since you've used it and either you or the bow has changed in that time.
The meaning of 'older brother' for 哥 is apparently a later borrowing from a Xianbei dialect, so the original meaning of it is probably just 'song, sing' like in its elaborated form 歌.
@@TomeTomeTomeTome "We" and "Wi" are obsolete characters that used to represent sounds in Japanese that don't occur anymore (at least not in a single mora). They may sometimes be used stylistically but overall no one uses them for their intended purpose. They are however used frequently to write Okinawan.
After the explanation of the one character, I was hoping we'd hear about what mistakes led to all the other "ghost" kanji. I guess I'll have to look it up myself.
The examples you gave in 2:00 are actually consistant, those characters all origionally refer to something water-related. 治 in 政治 origionally refers to river control, in modern Chinese it just means management. 漢 origionally refers to the milky way (some say it refers to the Han river). And the Chinese word for the milky way is is 银河, which literally translates to "silver river". Today it usually refers to the Han ethinicty
The water radical in kan comes from a name of a river, it gives name to the han dynasty as a dynasty of kings from the ethnicity from the area of the river han, the chinese "chinese" ethnicity is han, and kanji is basically han characters.
It's the sound "Tsu" there's also シ (Shi), ソ (So) and ン (N*). * I romanized it as "N" but it changes it's pronunciation depending on the sound that comes after but it is always a nasal sound.
A lot of them are obscure characters that aren't really used anymore or corruptions of existing characters. The weird bow song fella seems to be read as ka in Japanese,but the only thing I gathered is that LeaF made a song filled with glitches and tempo changes and named it with the character. And if you're curious,yes,this reading is real and not something randomly assigned
4:10 this is false for Japanese, Chinese and Korean, look up unicode CJK unification where they tried to combine characters that they though were the same leading to much anger from Japanese whose characters got replaced by similar but different Chinese ones. This is reason why Japanese resisted unicode for so long and to this day have lower unicode use than most developed countries
the differences between modernized japanese and chinese characters (shinjitai vs. simplified) probably caused these right? which was why unicode adoption was postponed. I think the video would have made more sense if he mentioned the origins and developments of kanji, that they’re Chinese characters, and that they are used in Korean (not really, but hanja is still infrequently used), Chinese (hanzi), and Japanese (kanji), and that conflicts commonly occur.
@@commenter19393correct me if im wrong, but isn't the point of cjk unified to have one unicode for characters that have the same origin/meaning, and let fonts make them into the language specific form?
@@jinolin9062 Yes, but then they changed their mind, so now we have the ideographic variation database, which is kind of a terrible hack but at least it's better than nothing.
You need to actually read what the rule says. This rule just says that if a *single* source lists two things as being separate, they won't be combined. It says absolutely nothing about combining things from different sources, which was, frankly, kinda a practical necessity really (even if it was imperfect in some cases). And IMHO, the main reason why Japan was slower to adopt Unicode than many other places has nothing to do with this at all. It's simply because they already had a large, well-established computing infrastructure using the JIS standards, which were perfectly adequate for their needs, and largely incompatible with Unicode, so converting all of their existing systems over required a much bigger effort for them than for most other countries, so of course it's going to face more resistance and take longer in the end. It was just fundamentally a harder and more complicated change for them to do than most other people.
I think the best example of the backwards compatibility of Unicode with the Japanese Industrial Standard encoding schemes is the inclusion of the JIS symbol itself: 〄
Xiang Yu (項羽) took down the Qin dynasty (秦朝) more than 2000 years ago divided the terriroty of Qin into 4 states (諸侯國). One of them is Han State (漢國) which was named after the Han Rive (漢水) and was led by Liu Bang (劉邦) who in turn defeated Xiang Yu and established the Han Dynasty (漢朝). The Han Dynasty was so powerful that even after the fall of the dynasty the Chinese people then still calls themselves Han People (漢人) and the characters of the Chinese language was subquently called Hanzi (漢字) or Kanji (漢字) in Japanese. Also the og meaning of Han 漢 is milkyway and milkyway in chinese methology is usually refered as a giant silver river (銀河) in the sky, hence the water radical.
As a Chinese, two of these characters are common, "閏" and "祢". Others are often borrowed from the pronunciation of the main part and combined with various strange symbols, which are called "Mars characters". For example, "彁暃蟐帥（哥非常帥）" means "brother (me) is very handsome"
And just like other languages, words get obsoleted and no longer been used so some characters lost its meaning in the process, and sometimes, it might be a writing mistake through transcriptions.
Typical of western media, they don’t know that most traditional Japanese/koreans/East Asian culture up until the last 200-300 years originated from China
the pronunciation of 彁 in Chinese is "ge", which be used in the ancient books of Han Dynasty like:《後漢書·張衡列傳》屑瑤繠以為彁兮，巩白水以為漿。 or: 《通典·乘勝》:至高壁嶺，總管劉弘執馬而諫曰：「彁糧已竭，士卒疲頓，願且停營，待兵糧咸集，而後決戰。」 So why did you guys say this Kanji is meaningless?
This is why I love chinese characters. It feels much more like a rabbit hole than other writing systems, the fact that there's probably STILL thousands of unknown characters ready to be discovered is exhillarating! I look at it like a secret entrance to another world of linguistics :>
6:20 this is the same reason that fan favourite, ꙮ recently got more eyes. The guy that encoded the original and made the first font for it had a bad scan, and created a font for that, which he then submitted to Unicode. Later, somebody found a better scan which had MORE EYES and was EVEN BIGGER. So there is a correction to the Unicode standard to give that character MORE EYES (Unicode does allow changes to glyphs in their code charts!)
This reminds me of how Taiwanese people use the character 水 (water) as texting slang for 媠 (beautiful) because, while 媠 is the correct character for the common word for “beautiful” in Hokkien dialects, it hasn’t been used in Mandarin writings in centuries. Because the characters and keyboards were all built for Mandarin, it’s really hard to easily type 媠, but it’s really easy to type 水, which happens to have similar pronunciation in Hokkien
What's interesting is how number 8 looks to me (a non Japanese person) a lot like the symbol for open/closed/locked/unlocked that a lot of Japanese doors have on it.
You're thinking of 開 and 閉. That's cuz 門 means "door". It's one of those radical things that Sam mentioned in the vid that can sort of allow you to guess what a word means.
One of the first things you learn when learning kanji is to avoid extrapolating the meaning based on the radicals that make it up. Asking what a radical means would be like asking what the letter "b" means. It means nothing on it's own, it just makes up other words.
IIRC there's a related phenomenon of ghost characters that I don't remember the name, but it's basically characters that we only have one example of usage, i.e. there's only one source where we could find it, and it appears there only once. We can sort of understand them by context, but we don't know for sure.
Nearly half of Japanese ghost Kanji are confirmed to have been found in obscure Chinese or Korean sources -- often as misspellings or local alternative forms, including 妛. However, the Japanese 妛 seems to have been recorded independently. It is also possible that Japan's extensive archives of Chinese (yes, Japan preserved thousands of ancient Chinese books of which no originals in China have been found) and Manyōgana texts inevitably contained non-standard Kanji that somehow influenced the record keeping.
Okay hold up Sam, and this better go in a correction vid, but the unicode standard doesn't encode "all" the characters and symbols and "all" the words languages (Video timestamp. 3:50).There are tons of languages that for whatever reason haven't been deemed "important enough" to encode and then there are also tons of languages that still don't have a written form, not to mention the fact that there are probably still some undiscovered natural languages out there.
I remember seeing a related article on Asahi Shinbun (in Japanese) as part of a series about Japanese linguistics some time ago. About 彁 in particular, they found out through an OCR reserch of old newspapers scans in their archives one instance of it inside a 1923 newspaper (the article about the finding comes up on top of a Google search just by inputing 彁 朝日新聞). Well, it turns out that, in that specific case, it was just the old, pre-reform kanji 彊 (now 強, meaning strong), just scrunched and faded-out. I assume all the other ghost kanjis all come from similar misreadings of old printed materials, it's all a matter of figuring out what they actually were originally.
Space Battleship Yamato introduced a character called 玲 by the fact that nobody would get her name right. 玲 would usually be read Rei, as many characters with 令 in them are. So everyone assumes that's her name. But it turns out that her name is actually read Akira because screw you. It also has the extremely useful meaning of "sound of gemstones".
I really don't think the "needle in a haystack" metaphor needs a modern update. Looking for a needle in a haystack would be a nightmare not just because of it being a small object in a large pile, but also due to the needle being a sharp object which could easily hurt the searcher.
When I wss in Japan, we used to make fun of "uso-ji" 嘘字 (literally fake characters), like extremely complex with 100+ strokes, and we knew: they are not real XD
Kanji is old because it came from our Chinese language. In Simplified Chinese, it's 汉语 (hànzì). In traditional Chinese, it's 漢字 (hànzì). 漢字 (hànzì) means "Chinese characters" in English. It specifically refers to the logographic characters used in the writing systems of the Chinese language and its derivatives. Each 漢字 typically represents a morpheme or a unit of meaning, and they are used in writing across various East Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. The strokes and structures of 漢字 are intricate and hold significant cultural and linguistic importance in East Asia. Historically, 漢字 (hànzì), or Chinese characters, signify several important aspects: 1. Cultural Heritage: 漢字 have been used for thousands of years in China and neighboring countries. They carry a rich cultural heritage, representing the history, literature, and traditions of East Asian civilizations. 2. Unified Writing System: 漢字 historically provided a unified writing system across regions with diverse spoken languages in East Asia. This facilitated communication and cultural exchange among different ethnic groups. 3. Scholarly Tradition: The mastery of 漢字 was traditionally a mark of education and literacy in East Asian societies. Knowledge of 漢字 was essential for accessing classical texts, philosophy, and administrative documents. 4. Artistic Expression: The calligraphy of 漢字 has been considered an art form in itself, with skilled calligraphers admired for their mastery of brush strokes and artistic expression. 5. International Influence: 漢字 have influenced the writing systems of neighboring countries such as Japan (kanji), Korea (hanja), and Vietnam (Hán tự). This influence extends to cultural practices, literature, and even modern technological advancements. 6. Evolution and Adaptations: Over time, 漢字 have evolved in form and usage, reflecting changes in language, society, and technological advancements. Despite adaptations and simplifications (as seen in simplified Chinese characters), the fundamental structure and historical significance of 漢字 remain deeply rooted in East Asian cultures. Overall, 漢字 historically signifies a profound cultural, linguistic, and artistic legacy that continues to shape East Asian societies and influence global perceptions of Asian heritage.
“Jinmei” means “People’s Names” and indicates that people’s names can only use the Kanji in that block. The other block is of other common use Kanji that are not allowed to be used for a person’s name. For example, a couple wanted to name their daughter “strawberry” but the Kanji for strawberry, though common, is not a Jinmei Kanji and though they sued in court, they were still not allowed to use the Kanji for strawberry for their daughter’s name.
just noticed an error, your using the logo for the academic network in the UK the Joint Information Systems Committee instead of the one for the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee
Actually the water radical in 漢 is easy to explain. The original meaning of 漢 is the name of a river, the Han river, located in central China, and the surrounding land was then called 漢中, and the guy who ruled that land was called 漢王 (the lord of Han). 劉邦(Liu Bang) became the lord of Han in 206 BCE, and later conquer the whole China and became the new emperor in 202 BCE. He named his regime over his old fief, 漢朝 (Han Dynasty), which became the first golden age of Chinese history, mirroring the Roman Empire on the other side of the continent at the same time. Sine the Han Dynasty, the Chinese people start referring themselves as 漢人(Han people, or Han Chinese), and all their stuff as Han-something. And that's how the name 漢字(Han zi) came to be, and Kanji is just the Japanese pronunciation. So yeah, that's how the word for Kanji is related to water.
I heard this from my Japanese instructor that even during the Edo period, there were Kanji characters that were written differently region by region and those obscure Kanji characters became semi-normal in a certain prefecture of today. Some of the most unusual ones are for placenames in Japan. Those extremely obscure ones would likely came from Japanese style Kanji cursives. It's also generally difficult for Japan to adopt better civic organizational systems due to maintaining the Meiji era prefecture system (都道府県, todōfuken) to this day that doesn't streamline municipal-level government works that easily. Hence a lot of minor errors in reading and writing Kanji characters popping up to this day. If anybody would learn Japanese very seriously, some of you may notice that today's Japan still has these uncomfortable late 19th century vibes in the society and among individuals.
@fandroid6491 it translating ka to a question sorta makes sense because when you use ka at the end of a sentence it turns it into a question. その文字は漢字です
kanji=汉字=the character of Han people. Han people are a group of people originated from a river in china. The name of that river? You guessed it! Han! now you know why there is a water radical in the word Kanji. :) similarly in 治, this character originally meant to control the flood (大禹治水）. Again actually the water radicals make sense there. There has been extensive discussion on Chinese Quora (Zhihu) whether any chinese character with a water radical means something related to water. The answer is loosely yes, pretty much all chinese characters with a water radical originally meant something loosely related to water.
I don't read/speak Japanese, have never been/not currently planning on going to Japan - but it warms the cockles for you have covered this topic. Thanks Sam, another thing I didn't know I didn't know ticked off the list :)
妛-chī 挧-yǔ (Meaning Lingering in Japanese and meaning hammer in Chinese and meaning pan in Cantonese) 暃-fēi (meaning dawn in Chinese and meaning sun in english) 椦-quan (Meaning Palm Trees) 槞-lóng (Meaning Oak) 祢-mí (Meaning You [probably used in old times]) 閠-rùn (Meaning Close in Cantonese and Meaning eunuch in Chinese) 駲-zhōu (Meaning Mistletoe in Chinese and Meaning gun in Japanese) 墸-zhù (Meaning always in Japanese) 壥-chán (Meaning Can (noun) in Chinese and Bag in Japanese)/(Meaning stepping back in Japanese) 彁-gē
I wonder if anyone bothered to look through Vietnamese characters (chữ nôm). When Vietnam used Chinese characters, they also created many new ones for Vietnamese words. Wikipedia says: "In contrast to the few hundred Japanese kokuji (国字) and handful of Korean gukja (국자, 國字), which are mostly rarely used characters for indigenous natural phenomena, Vietnamese scribes created thousands of new characters, used throughout the language." I found 槞 in a chữ nôm dictionary as trồng (to cultivate).
No, that character is just me.
real
Facts
E
Did you edit the name of that channel just to say that? 🤣
@@SilverSword2000 I don't think so their channel url also contains the character, but I don't think that one changes if you update your name?
As a Japanese, I’ve never seen those characters. Except when any file breaks in my computer because of unicode and JIS being incompatible
E
Classic mojibake -- a Japanese word, by the way!
it'd be more surprising if you have, no? hehe
Mojibake?
@@danieldronzek8616 Mojibake ("character transformation") is the garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding.
I’m a font designer in Japan. Sometimes designers make mistakes when putting together a letter. These days they get caught when checking for mistakes and the vectors get edited, but in the old days before computer aided design it was much easier for things to slip through the cracks, then all of a sudden - a new kanji has accidentally been invented.
Kanji are much easier to design in my opinion because once you make the radicals you can piece them together like a jigsaw, though modification is still needed.
Easier than kana or easier than English letters?
For a moment, at your "these days they get caught", I thought you meant the designers rather than the mistakes. Like, they're doing it sneakily😂😂 Oops.
@@TitularHeroine GOOGLE TRANSLATE SHALL FEEL MY WRATH!!! *add hash mark to kanji* _supervillian laughter_
japanese font names be like
a-otf shin go pro
fot-chiaro std b
dfp(insert chinese characters here that i cant even read lol)w(insert your font thiccness here)
And, of course, you can NEVER have too many Kanji, right?
That 'Jisc' logo is wrong - it's for a United Kingdom not-for-profit organisation that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education and research and not the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee, FYI
I was wondering what the uk Jisc company had to do with Japan’s standards committee. Thanks for highlighting.
Shoots, looks like Sam is gonna ask Amy to investigate seppuku next
Can’t wait for next year’s mistake video
ouch lol
Reminds me of the news using the UNSC logo from Halo for the UN Security Council.
The "Kan" in Kanji ultimately comes from the Han River in China, which is why it has a water radical.
That may be true, but in Japanese usage, that character has nothing to do with a river anymore. It basically just means "China" ("kanji" (漢字) literally just means "Chinese characters").
Which of course just highlights one of the big problems with assigning meanings to Japanese kanji based on their elements or appearance, because they weren't even developed as part of Japanese to begin with (they were basically just -stolen- ..ahem.. adopted from Chinese), even in Chinese their meanings had sometimes diverged from what they once were, and on top of that the ways in which they were adapted to Japanese sometimes had very little to do with their Chinese origins or meanings (for example, many were originally used phonetically in Japanese, because they had a particular pronunciation, not because of a particular meaning, and then came to develop their own unique Japanese meanings from those usages).
I'd argue that very much still has to do with water: "characters of the people who are of the Han River" would still relate to water.
Every language on earth have words that swayed from their original meaning. It is like saying learning Latin prefixes and suffixes would not help your to understand English, which is not entirely true. Radicals can hint the meaning of a word to a certain degree, and knowing the backstory behind a word gives you a better understanding and chance of sticking it in your head.
The "Kan" in Kanji comes from the Han dynasty and which also refers to the Han Chinese people.
@@georgedeng8646 And the Han people came from the area around the Han River, thus the water radical. (Okay, I am going to have to edit this comment, because people decided to ignore the context of what I was saying. The Han people, who existed as developing cultural and ethnic groups for hundreds and thousands of years before the formation of the Han kingdom, later considered the Han Kingdom as their unifiying ethnic and cultural origin, and took their name from it. The clarification of my original comment was to explain why the character for "Kan"/"Han" has a water radical, not to explain the totality of the political and cultural history, and for that matter, the difference between political and cultural history, in a UA-cam comment.
the characters 漢 and 治 both feature the same radical 氵because they originated as names of two ancient rivers. So yes, they are water related, but over the ages they took on more significant meanings that surpassed their original definition
治 should mean solving watery problem in the first place, then it extends to solving problems in general, and finally sticks to rulings and governance.
Did you mean to use a different character for ji? Because the two you wrote there are pronounced kan and ji, but the second one isn't used to write the word kanji, but rather 字 is.
@@TheCuber2400they mean 政治 meaning politics
Aren't all rivers ancient?
@@peccantis No. Canals often aren't.
I'm so going to get a neck tattoo with those characters.
Beep beep lettuce
@@ThefrogbreadPhilosophically rich and deep words
What happens when they eventually find out what it means and the meaning is 'short pp' or pdfile?
Then no one could make fun of you for it being a really funny word you didn't know! Or, you could tell people what it means. Either way, awesome tat idea!
All that's going to happen is Chinese people will think it's Japanese and Japanese people will think it's Chinese lol
Take notes: this would be a really cool way to write out the name of some unknowable eldritch being
Well, Hawaiian is a completely language, and the Hawaiian alphabet has 13 letters, and we have 12 kanji here. If we decide to replace the letter P with two ‘okina (apostrophes) then we now have a 12-letter Hawaiian alphabet. Then you could replace the letters with the kanji. The result is a relex of a completely language.
That means that it’s certainly viable to create a language that isn’t a relex, using just these 12 kanji as letters.
Already has been done; theres analog horror based out of these
@@nathanoher4865 But kanji is not a letter. lol
Kanji usually represent one or more syllables, and also represents meaning.
@@tovarishchfeixiao I know how kanji are supposed to work, but I’m saying that you could create a cursed alphabet using those symbols as the letters and then spell the name of the eldritch being OP was talking about with that alphabet
@@tovarishchfeixiaoWell, the 12 in the video represent zero syllables.
政治 more precisely means “Politics” rather than “government”, with 治 kind of meaning “management”/“solve”/“rule” etc, which is actually related to water too because in very ancient times the leaders are the ones who manage the river, which the community is built upon.
yep, in ancient China, 治水 meaning manage flood. There is theory that Chinese civilization transformed from tribe to form countries, specifically because of collective need to manage/prevent floods.
@testxxxx123
Sweet.
Thanks for the knowledge man !!!
I believe that theory 1000% !¡!
I find it so believable because of :
🅰️ : The sheer size of China [even minus all modern China]
🅱️ : The remarkable Cohesion the entire country had during almost all of its history and dynasties !¡! Qin, Han... Tang... Song ... Yuan, Ming, Qing.
It's remarkable how vast and cohesive China remained throughout such a long historical span.
I never thought about it, or laid attention to it, but now that I have seen your comment it really starts making sense to me !!!¡¡¡!!!
Nonsense. The etymological dictionary says 治 was just originally the name of some river, and just by accident it was pronounced the same as the word for "to govern", so the person decided to reuse the character.
@@thisismycoolnickname Yes, that makes more sense, since that's how it usually goes for kanji. A Chinese character represent a word, and then the Japanese started using the same character to represent a Japanese word which sounded similar to the Chinese one, no matter the actual Chinese meaning.
@@Renwoxing13Another theory, mind you, is that civilization is built on agriculture, agriculture on grain, and the primary grain which built Chinese civilization was rice, an incredibly finnicky and stubborn crop which in premodern times would involve the cooperation of many kinds of tradesmen, as opposed to grains like corn and wheat, which a lone farmer can grow with some effort and a family can easily grow, with no need for the cooperation of a larger community. This tracks with other cultures and civilizations that either grew crops that required more extensive terraforming and irrigation or inhabited areas where farming in general necessitated such measures (eg high altitude mountain slopes, which require both leveling/terracing and creative irrigation, similar to growing rice in general); as compared to cultures which grew easier crops in easier terrain. Rice and extreme terrain encourage collectivism because each person must contribute to the plight of a farmer while each individual relies on the community to fulfill their most basic need, while other grains and easy terrain encourage individualism because each farmer's farm belongs to him (to some extent, in theory and in primitive society; serfdom seems to be a nearly inevitable consequence of individualism) and the community relies on the individual.
There's a song in Taiko no Tatsujin by LeaF called "彁 (Ka)". It's this insane glitch song with multiple time signatures, almost like a "ghost in the machine", like the ghost letter in its title. Also, the beat map goes completely crazy with beats overlapping each other constantly.
There is also one song by a Doujin circle called Diao ye zong. The kanji seems like a cool character since it have no meanings or like a glitch in the system.
What's a "Doujin"?
Can we declare it to be Missingno's theme song?
LeaF MENTIONED
@@Kilted_Dragon Basically the Japanese version of independent creators. No corpos.
The theory I've always heard is that 彁 was copied from a blurry photocopy of 埼玉自彊会 "Saitama Cooperative Organization" from a 1923 newspaper. I guess thats speculation.
The symbol itself looks like a photocopier. Maybe it's an in joke. 😅
@@Xanaduumthe first emoji?!
Yes, that’s true.
Kanji 1 in the name contains one element of (Ka), and kanji 4 contains another part of it, too. What do they mean individually, and could it perhaps give it a new meaning?
@@victoralexandervinkenes9193 埼 means “headlands”, 彁 doesn’t mean anything since it’s a ghost kanji. If it had a meaning it would probably have something to do with curves, since it has the 弓 radical.
In our language, Urdu, there is one character that appears in the regular alphabet, is taught in primary school, etc but is only used in the spelling of a single word.
I'm guessing that it's a word of Persian origin
it's special
ژ
?
What is it?
From the analysis of a Vietnamese Nôm scholar, the character 彁 looks like a combination of 弓 and 哥. 弓 mostly stand for a bow, or to strive for something. 哥 is usually used for adressing someone who is male which is older, or same age as you. However he suspects that 哥 is actually the duplication of 可, meaning worthy, or great ambition, or (able to) achive. Duplications is often used in traditional Chinese to exaggerate or emphasize the meaning of the character. So 彁 could means to strive for something unfathomably great, something that is of great meanings, or extreme worth.
Do take this with a pinch of salt though.
"strive for great meaning" not meaning anything is so good
It probably just means archery assistant. The guy that picks the arrows and give to you instead of a nobleman doing it
In the same way that 木 is a tree, 林 is a woods, and 森 is a forest. And you can combine it to 森林 to mean something like woodlands, a region that has many woods or forests, or just an even greater variety of forest. Japanese has this duplication too, and in current use.
Thanks for making common sense connections! Many languages lost, many North American tribes wiped out, do not let people say that somthing is nothing, when in the back our minds have a good idea. Memories from 3 generations back are in our heads today, and this is recently published in specially written psychology journals that do computer science and memory studies. Peace.
Oh yes, favourite is 姦, which is woman 3 times. It means cunning, wicked or noisy. 😅
Hanzi (Chinese Traditional and Simplified), Kanji (Japanese), and Hanja (Korean Han characters) all originate from 5th century Chinese characters. Many characters lost or changed meaning along the way.
Hey you're talking to an American UA-camr here... these American trivia UA-camrs like HAI/Wendover, RLL generally have room temp IQ lol
@@lipschitzlyapunov True. Somehow they don't have a big picture of how the greater world interact.
For example, the name of about 90% of chemical elements.
Sick doesn't mean sick.
@@lipschitzlyapunov stop it, I use celsius.
Small correction: Kanji are ultimately Chinese characters, and it would be more accurate to say that the Kangxi Dictionary contains 40,000 Chinese Characters and not Kanji, as #1 only a small portion of those characters are used as kanji (and to be honest in normal Chinese communication) and #2 the pronounciation and definitions given in the dictionary are for Chinese and not Japanese.
Yeah I thought the same thing but also thought that it was a pretty good simplification for a short video.
Yeah typical Japanophiles always downplay the Chinese origins of things. Origami, Kanji, Bonsai, calligraphy - all ripped off from the Chinese but they act like they invented them.
Yep. A Chinese person can read Japanese Kanji and understand about 75% of the meaning while a Japanese person would only understand about 20% of Traditional Chinese characters.
Tokyo in Japanese is pronounced: 東 To 京 Kyo , in Mandarin Chinese 東 Dong 京 Jing. Although the pronunciation is different, the meaning is still the same, literally "Eastern capital."
There's also 国字 which are Kanji invented by Japanese people like 働.
Or he flubbed the pronunciation of "Kangxi". But you're probably right. That said, the Japanese kanji and Chinese hanzi aren't exactly the same. Both linguistic communities modified them.
I think for 99% of population using Kanji, at least half of the ~50,000 Kanji characters are never learnt or seen in their lives. There were popular TV shows in China where teenagers compete each other to pronounce and explain random "fossil" characters. My theory is that people just keep inventing new characters back in the days when they couldn't find one to mean what they had in mind, because there wasn't a widely used dictionary to keep track of those. Then they end up like niche memes that no one understands in a few years.
I imagine that such invention of characters has stopped in the modern day simply because Unicode doesn't have the abilities to do such things. (Unless someone wants to hijack the seventeen characters from 13430 to 13440 for use in a completely different script.) At least alphabets have the ability to make shit up, like the term “alfgontrausnamatation”.
@@Blue-Maned_Hawk Given how weird Gen Z is, I wouldn't be surprised if "alfgontrausnamatation" becomes a real slang word
[Grumpy Cat kanji] [Badgers Badgers Badgers kanji] [Distracted Boyfriend kanji] [Longcat kanji]
@@fandroid6491 I dunno why you're making this a generational thing-people can be weird and make things up no matter what their age.
@@Blue-Maned_Hawk except it does, but few system (if any) actually implement that and would just show the raw string. Kinda like how old phones would display skin tone variation of an emoji with the original one followed by a skin tone square.
A newspaper from 1923 was thought to have the character 彁 in the expression 埼玉自彁會，but the page was a smaller reprint, and it was later revealed to be 彊（variant of 強）as in 自彊會。
The Jisc logo in your video is not the same JISC. The one you used is a UK based organisation that provides IT services to academic institutions.
That's hilarious. I hope someone gets fired for this blunder.
@dacueba-games calm your tits. No one is gonna get fired. These channels produce a lot of videos month, heck you just watched a video about how A GOVERNMENT run department that was tasked with making a list of all the special characters used in a countries language and how in searching for the thousands of individual, hyper localised to a region, characters used to refer to anything and everything, they made mistakes sifting through who knows how many documents and books to find each character. In Japan, the katakana for the same thing can look completely different from one part of the country to the next. So yes, the JISC made mistake and a couple of writers and researchers on a UA-cam channel who are likely working on multiple projects at a time will also make mistakes.
The only thing that will most likely happen at best is that they are gonna acknowledge the mistake in the next "Ooops, are all the things we were wrong about in all our videos from the last video we made telling the things we wrong about :-P" video and show what the correct logo is.
And besides!!!! Just because the logo was wrong doesn't mean the information they gave is incorrect. It's not like all of a sudden the tech support JISC in England is gonna be get requests to figure out what the Kanji for a bruised banana is for a hyper specific village in a remote part of North eastern Japan just because HaI used their logo instead of the JISC in Japan's logo.
@@dacueba-games I too am unable to identify humor. Please imagine, or ask chat gtp for, a very long and unnecessary text where I explain the thing to you, you obviously already know, starting with the plot of the thing you've just seen.
i need whoever was responsible to be sacked
@@zzyzx0069They’re making Simpsons reference. They almost definitely are not calling for a HAI editor to get sacked.
There's actually a full 51 hiragana and katakana characters.
3 are no longer used in modern Japanese, but do appear in historical tests (and in some fonts); 𛀆/𛄠 (yi), 𛀁/𛄡 (ye), 𛄟/𛄢 (wu).
Another 2 of the remaining 48 are almost never used except in specific circumstances and have alternative kana combinations to make the sound instead; ゐ/ヰ (wi), ゑ/ヱ (we).
These are known as the gojuon, "the fifty sounds".
The 51st kana is ん/ン (n) and was only created in the early 1900s to replace む/ム (mu) in words that make the "u" sound silent when spoken aloud.
Edit:
And then there's "small kana", but that's an easier situation; smaller versions of the "y" sounds, vowel sounds, and the "tsu" sound.
lol, these show up as “?”s on my phone.
I'm on Android, the yi-ye-wu characters appear corrupted 😅
Edit: Came back on Windows Chrome and except for the first ye character (𛀁) the rest are still corrupt
I like how the Japanese didn't load on my phone.
Thank you for the explanation.
That was debunked btw
wait i didn't know that ん/ン is a recent conscious invention, i just assumed it was a funny little phonetic quirk of Japanese that of all consonants only n existed on its own
There is a fundamental mistake in the explanation : You only look at the Japanese side of the story, and totally forget that the "Sinograms" or Chinese Characters are used in Simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Japanese and even Korean
To summerize, I worked 15 years ago on how to display "Sinograms" on mobile fone, and managed to have a paper copy of the Unicode characters list, from 0x0000 to 0xFFFF. The whole book is more thick than a Chinese dictionary....
So the Sinograms part runs from 0x4E00 to 0x9FFF ( 20 992 Possible characters) and it pretends to encode ALL Sinograms, and also "Japanese / Korean own creation" in it, so that a Full Unicode compatible font can display full Chinese, Japanese and Korean text (I will call it CJK to simplify)
So, if one particular character exist in ALL CJK languages, than it will get one common code. Example 0x4E00 is "一" meaning "one" in all three CJK language, and has the same meaning.
But some time a characters has the same meaning in ALL CJK languages, but has some graphical difference (due to simplification or local practice, sometime it is very subtile), it still use different code. A very good example is the character meaning "To Say" 0x8AAA "說", this is the Trad. Chinese form, for simp. Chinese it is simplified as 0x8BF4 "说" by reducing the "Speak" radical on the left, and in Japanese it is 0x8AAC "説" as the two stroke on the top right corner goes inward in stead of outward
One last category is Japanese / Korean local variant, and the best example is the character "Dragon" : If you start with the Japanese JIS standard, you will get 0x7ADC "竜", this is the Japanese style simplification of the Trad Chinese it is 0x9F8D "龍", and some old Japanese people may know that. but the Mainland Chinasimplification 0x9F99 "龙" is totally unknown to Japanese people.
All this to say that the 12 characters you listed are of 90% chance obsolete or rarely use old Chinese characters, or use only in some historical people name, like the last character of the 1st row is part of the name of a lady in Chinese mythology, Chang Er "嫦娥" , who fleed to the moon after drinking an immortal elixir. As the story is not know in Japan, no reason the JIS encode this 2 characters.
Another fun fact is the whole Sinograms area in the Unicode is ordered in the old Chinese dictionary way: by the number if strock of the radical in traditional Chinese, then the number of stokes of the remaining part. Now a day (not much) young people know how to find a word in a paper Chinese dictionary :)
Imagine digging into every single plausible source, all around asia, including a vary ancient one, to identify if this letter has known use.
wrong radical bro, 嫦娥 chang-e is written with "女"for female and not "虫" for bug as shown in the video, so the 12 characters listed are probably completely obsolete...
@@hamsterfloat That's what they did for those 12. If they were old or obsolete Chinese characters, they would have been found much, much faster. That would be one of the first places they looked
The character "治" (zhì) in "政治" (zhèngzhì), meaning government, originally means "to stop a flood." The ability to stop a flood signifies the capacity to organize a large group of people to work together on a project, hence the connotation of governance. The first king of the Xia Dynasty is said to be an engineer who stopped the Yellow River from flooding, as recounted in the famous tale of 大禹治水 (Dà Yǔ Zhì Shuǐ).
The character "漢" (hàn) means Chinese because the Han Dynasty is considered the golden era of ancient China. The Han Dynasty was named after the Han River (漢江, Hàn Jiāng), which was in turn named after the Milky Way (星漢/河漢, Xīng Hàn/Hé Hàn), a "river in the sky."
Therefore, both of these characters originally have meanings related to water.💦
Akenbara 𡚴原 is 5km north of Taga, in Kawachi, in the mountains on the east of the lake.
As an asian, I can confirm that we painstakingly search for every kanji one by one in unicode when we text
As a Taiwanese, I can confirm that is indeed how the Thai language works
@@SL16867lol wut?
back when i was still early in learning Japanese, i genuinely thought that was how asian languages worked and was scared that id always need a unicode dictionary on me XD . luckly now i know how hiragana/katakana work
can’t tell if your serious lol but i’m gonna guess not bc that would be insanity
@@Archchill The joke aside, Chinese is usually typed with a romanised spelling system called Pinyin, and then you can choose the words from the list of Kanji shown. Japanese words works similarly by inputting Kana instead of Pinyin.
Pro Tip: Learning Katakana and Hiragana alone can be very helpful when you wanna play japanese only games. Many words are simply japanized english words. For example, if you have a racing game : グランプリ is Gu ra n Pu Ri.. Grand Prix.
The fun thing with your exemple is it's not even english (i mean in term of origin). It's french: "Grand Prix" litterally mean "Big Prize".
Localized loanwords ahoy! Sometimes the developer intentionally chose to use the foreign word as-is.
Best example: "anime" is a _double_ loanword, first borrowed from the English word "animation", then borrowed back but with a different, new meaning.
@@Rouky60 lol right... there are also many french words... but I think people know what I mean
@@Stratelier interesting, thanks for this fun fact
@@Rouky60English is full of loanwords, lol
Actually one of the most interesting videos you all have put out in a minute.
i guess you could say it was full interesting
Yeah this channel is getting way too interesting. This video here is like "Twice as Interesting" at the very least.
Even Jisho has these listed as "(phantom kanji)". Every day I get more and more fascinated by these characters, even if I still can't read most words.
The oldest one of the Japanese written langauge evolved from Traditional Chinese. They even look the same and have similar meanings. This effect orginates from the 华夏文化圈(chinese culture circle), where chinese culture got exported to other countries around it during ancient times (as China was very powerful and influential in East Asia, esp during the Tang and Song dynasties).
Are you sure that means "chinese culture circle"? Because I know a few of these characters myself and I'm pretty sure the first two characters mean ""glowing summer".
@@explosion1972华 as in 华文的文。
You are right that 夏 stands for summer. In this context however, 华夏 stands for China / Chinese
文化代表culture.
圈 is… well circle
Where did you get the glowing part from? lol
@@htrowii1090 According to additional research(=google) of my own, you are right. About the glowing part - either my translation mistake or the meaning has changed over the course of several millennia.
More on the Chinese side perspective of these mystery characters:
Past dynasties of China have used different sets of characters and they were translated into newer characters as history progresses. A recent example would be the creation of simplified chinese by the chinese communist party, which created a new set of characters with DIFFERENT radicals (before that there were simplified chinese characters used in local regions but they still follow a set of rules (六書造字法).) and the simplification of Chinese hanji (which happened much after kangxi dictionary) might have created new unicode characters. As implicated by the original post, simplified chinese, traditional chinese and japanese kanji can share similarities, but some words are coded with different codes.
The Hanji we use in daily lives are very limited, some that are translated from previous sets of characters might have became redundant, irrelevant and have lost their meaning, transposable as it is, most didnt made it into the computer display codes.
Buddhism has continuously has a huge impact in both China and Japan. There is proof of trading and interaction of the now Chinese and India regions especially after the Han dynasty where great expeditions were made. And particularly in Tong dynasty, Japan has frequent visits to China to trade, and also to learn the Buddhism of China. Thus, Buddhism was also impactful in Japan dating back until (if im not mistaken) the Sengoku era, where warlords suppressed Buddhism organisations and focused more on Japan’s own religions for coherence by nationalism, which they call 大和魂. China’s monks might have translated Hindu’s Buddhism scripts into Chinese characters for easier pronunciation and spreading the religion. Therefore, the “mysterious characters” might have no particular meaning because they were the Chinese pronunciation for the Sanskrit Buddhism scripts.
As I am aware, aside from the 12 mysterious characters that made into the unicode, there might be much more of them that didnt make the cut because of irrelevancy. So these are my possible theories from the Sino-perspective. I am ethically Chinese and could read Chinese, but I could’ve made mistakes so these are just possible theories.
JIS = Japanese Industrial Standard
C/X = Generation/iteration
xxxx(the numbers) = the version
Thanks for that!
Being an engine nut I know about JIS screws but never realized that was only one specific spec they set and rather a system of standardizing everything, language included. That blew my mind. I never thought to look any deeper than my existing knowledge of JIS fasteners.
The C/X is actually the category of the standard - C is for electronics and X is for information processing
@@random832 so the specific iteration...
@@goosenotmaverick1156 That I have no idea about
@@goosenotmaverick1156it's the equivalent of ISO, the International Standards Organization but for Japan. A lot of JIS standards are equivalent to ISO ones. There's standards for everything you can think of
Can't wait for LeaF's 11 songs for the other characters.
For context: ua-cam.com/video/EsOU0V2kpUI/v-deo.html
Haha true
@@newmarowak wow, i had seen the taiko chart (which is also nightmarish lol), but never this mindfuck of a music video :0
@@newmarowak how the heck did you manage to post a hyperlink without getting instantly youtube filtered for no reason
To be fair 彁 i believe is the only one with no possible origin. The other ones are all written in older dictionaries and whatnot
According to Kanji Recognizer ...
妛 - Ugly (みにくい)
挧 - Japanese Horse Chestnut (とち)
暃 - Be separated (ヒ)
椦 - Wickerwork (まげもの ケン)
槞 - Cage (ロウ)
蟐 - Mantis, Toad (もみ)
袮 - Ancestral Shrine, Embroidery (チ デイ ネ)
閠 - Illegitimate Throne, Intercalation (うるう)
駲 - Horse's Buttocks (シュウ ジュン)
墸 - Hesitate (チョ)
壥 - Fine Residence, Shop, Store (テン)
彁 - "No known meaning; S&H uses jabberwocky words" (カ セイ)
“Please stay away from this creature.”
Lol
oh that video
Akenbara is a neighborhood in the Kawaguchi section of Taga, Shiga-Ken. It's hard to find on maps since it is not a town or a village.
The original meanings of the words "漢" and 跟"治" are strongly related to water.
"漢" originally meant the Milky Way, but this word was used by Liu Bang as the name of the country.
"治" originally meant Hydraulic engineering. Later, the meaning was expanded, and its modern meaning is management.
And my personal guess is, out of all the possible words for it, the one that has something to do with water got picked because water is a common metaphor of people, who when gathered can push things.
the first leader(manager) of an ancient rice farming civilization was literally a hydraulic engineer.
@@seanxi The third. 尧舜禹, and it's 禹 who did hydraulic engineering.
@@FlameRat_YehLon ur right
非.
汉意思汉河, 这不是星道路.
Props to the writers on this one for not padding out the video with unhelpful or unrepresentative kanji examples to appear more knowledgeable about the writing system. This was pretty good. Yall have done better than like 99% of the channels out there who have made videos about kanji with zero clue what they're talking about
Wait what exactly are you talking about? Are you talking about people who go "Hey look at this "鬱". So complicated!"?
@@kakahass8845 Definitely part of it, yeah. I've got a bone to pick. People on youtube who make language content who don't actually know very much about Japanese have an annoying tendency to exoticize kanji while at the same time bemoan their continued use. It's usually the same handful of points regurgitated. 鬱 being too complicated (bonus if they use the dragons in flight character to make a point of how complicated characters are), "three trees makes a forest", confusion about onyomi vs kunyomi, kana being a "solution" to kanji, "one character = one word", 生 having too many readings, etc. Specs of trivia that don't represent how kanji function individually, don't adequately explain how they're actually are used in the orthography, yet are repeated endlessly and cited for other people's videos on the topic.
Whenever I meet someone who's interested but maybe doesn't know much about the Japanese language or kanji themselves, these are often the only things they know, which really sucks, I think. It leads to learners just starting out having this expectation that kanji are really scary and complicated and nonsensical, and your average person receiving an over-exoticized view of not just the language, but the culture too, with the implication that it is entirely inaccessible without dedicating ones life to study.
The fact that the writers here decided to just leave most the trivia and the cruft out, intentionally or not, makes this like one of the most "normal" videos about kanji I've ever seen. For an example of the complete opposite, Name Explain released a video somewhat recently that was pretty terrible on all these points. Thank you for reading my essay
@@dozyote Oh I see, I agree that it's irritating.
@@dozyoteThe whole thing about kanji looking like it would take a lifetime seems like obvious nonsense to me. I know some Traditional Chinese, and it takes a year or two of decent part-time instruction and flashcards to learn enough characters to read a newspaper. And that is _without_ either Simplified Chinese or kana to help!
@3:05 Nope, there are 4 levels of JIS kanji! The English Wikipedia article says 2, but the Japanese one has all 4.
It’s important to note the difference between “radicals” and components of characters though they often overlap. Radicals are how things are organized in the dictionary and don’t always carry meaning in a given character. Components are a more reliable way of parsing for meaning or pronunciation
The second character from the left in the bottom row is a Chinese character that only exists when talking about the extra month that sometimes gets inserted into the lunar calendar - when you add the extra month you just repeat one of the months and add that symbol. When researching the Chinese Lunar Calendar I asked several Chinese people what the character was and they had no idea. Took quite a lot of internet digging but then I figured it out! Anyway it’s probably a holdover from when Kanji were adopter from Chinese.
閏 (run4) does not have an additional dot, is there another character for that?
@@htrowii1090 in chinese ceyboarddw, cann bewryth o u'men'yu, is giveth 閠, 音闰.
@@htrowii1090 wiktionary lists 閠 (with dot) as a variant/alternative form of 閏 in Chinese usage
@@htrowii1090 閠, a variant character of 閏
@@htrowii1090Could be a lesser known variant character. The 王 radical when used in characters like 球 is actually supposed to be a 玉, so it is possible someone following the archaic rule without properly consulting etymology might use 玉 instead of 王 which is the correct element even when accounting for etymology.
Bow brother, perhaps archery assistant
That's pretty fun
Its worth noting that the JIS standard even misses a bunch. Adobe-Japan1-7 (they defacto font standard), includes about 14644 kanji, over double the JIS X 0213 standard. Including characters like 髙 which is fairly common in names.
To understand, remember China was a bunch of states prior to unification. And after unification there was regionalism, and different periods of splitting. 合久必分，分久必合。It is within periods of that, and in placesz you have special characters that reflect an area's vestigial languages or local dialects. And in places like Korea, Japan and Vietnam, they have their own words. And so it is not surprising there are such old words.
The element 哥 is most likely meant to be read phonetically as "ka" (Mandarin: "ge"), as its literal meaning "elder brother" is virtually never employed for constructing new characters. And the element 弓 is obviously the radical "bow", used for archery-related words.
So the meaning could be something like an archery-related sound effect, either "kaa..." (creaking of string being pulled) or "ka!" (twang of arrow let loose). But of course, Japanese manga has probably already assigned stock sound effects to these actions, so we'd need to find some aspect of the archery process that does not yet have an assigned sound.
The sound of slightly adjusting the bolts on a compound bow to change the strength because it's been a while since you've used it and either you or the bow has changed in that time.
The meaning of 'older brother' for 哥 is apparently a later borrowing from a Xianbei dialect, so the original meaning of it is probably just 'song, sing' like in its elaborated form 歌.
but for sound they would also give and combine it with 口
2:15 sam says 46 katakana characters but 47 are shown on screen, also moraic n is missing
For as long as I have known katakana I have literally never seen the last 3 on the list lol. Looking at them is so bizarre that they look fake.
@@TomeTomeTomeTome "We" and "Wi" are obsolete characters that used to represent sounds in Japanese that don't occur anymore (at least not in a single mora). They may sometimes be used stylistically but overall no one uses them for their intended purpose.
They are however used frequently to write Okinawan.
After the explanation of the one character, I was hoping we'd hear about what mistakes led to all the other "ghost" kanji. I guess I'll have to look it up myself.
The examples you gave in 2:00 are actually consistant, those characters all origionally refer to something water-related. 治 in 政治 origionally refers to river control, in modern Chinese it just means management. 漢 origionally refers to the milky way (some say it refers to the Han river). And the Chinese word for the milky way is is 银河, which literally translates to "silver river". Today it usually refers to the Han ethinicty
The logo used for Jisc in this video is for a UK higher education organisation, not the Japanese industrial standards Committee.
I think he just searched "jisc logo" and not "jisc japan"
The water radical in kan comes from a name of a river, it gives name to the han dynasty as a dynasty of kings from the ethnicity from the area of the river han, the chinese "chinese" ethnicity is han, and kanji is basically han characters.
But what does ツ mean?
It's the sound "Tsu" there's also シ (Shi), ソ (So) and ン (N*).
* I romanized it as "N" but it changes it's pronunciation depending on the sound that comes after but it is always a nasal sound.
Sound alphabet, no meaning
A lot of them are obscure characters that aren't really used anymore or corruptions of existing characters. The weird bow song fella seems to be read as ka in Japanese,but the only thing I gathered is that LeaF made a song filled with glitches and tempo changes and named it with the character. And if you're curious,yes,this reading is real and not something randomly assigned
4:10 this is false for Japanese, Chinese and Korean, look up unicode CJK unification where they tried to combine characters that they though were the same leading to much anger from Japanese whose characters got replaced by similar but different Chinese ones. This is reason why Japanese resisted unicode for so long and to this day have lower unicode use than most developed countries
the differences between modernized japanese and chinese characters (shinjitai vs. simplified) probably caused these right? which was why unicode adoption was postponed. I think the video would have made more sense if he mentioned the origins and developments of kanji, that they’re Chinese characters, and that they are used in Korean (not really, but hanja is still infrequently used), Chinese (hanzi), and Japanese (kanji), and that conflicts commonly occur.
@@commenter19393correct me if im wrong, but isn't the point of cjk unified to have one unicode for characters that have the same origin/meaning, and let fonts make them into the language specific form?
@@jinolin9062 Yes, but then they changed their mind, so now we have the ideographic variation database, which is kind of a terrible hack but at least it's better than nothing.
Funnily enough I've seen Japanese people use the simplified Chinese 泪 over 涙.
You need to actually read what the rule says. This rule just says that if a *single* source lists two things as being separate, they won't be combined. It says absolutely nothing about combining things from different sources, which was, frankly, kinda a practical necessity really (even if it was imperfect in some cases).
And IMHO, the main reason why Japan was slower to adopt Unicode than many other places has nothing to do with this at all. It's simply because they already had a large, well-established computing infrastructure using the JIS standards, which were perfectly adequate for their needs, and largely incompatible with Unicode, so converting all of their existing systems over required a much bigger effort for them than for most other countries, so of course it's going to face more resistance and take longer in the end. It was just fundamentally a harder and more complicated change for them to do than most other people.
I think the best example of the backwards compatibility of Unicode with the Japanese Industrial Standard encoding schemes is the inclusion of the JIS symbol itself: 〄
i wish you went through how each one of the 12 came to be because a Xerox line was so strange and fascinating.
Xiang Yu (項羽) took down the Qin dynasty (秦朝) more than 2000 years ago divided the terriroty of Qin into 4 states (諸侯國). One of them is Han State (漢國) which was named after the Han Rive (漢水) and was led by Liu Bang (劉邦) who in turn defeated Xiang Yu and established the Han Dynasty (漢朝). The Han Dynasty was so powerful that even after the fall of the dynasty the Chinese people then still calls themselves Han People (漢人) and the characters of the Chinese language was subquently called Hanzi (漢字) or Kanji (漢字) in Japanese.
Also the og meaning of Han 漢 is milkyway and milkyway in chinese methology is usually refered as a giant silver river (銀河) in the sky, hence the water radical.
Wasn't Liu Bang the badass who led a bunch of penal labourers towards a rebellion that overthrew the Qin?
西方有奶道，
東方有银河。
@@scythal Yes it was the same person.
Yay another random character to scare my friends with :D
how
@@HiByeIDKwhatToSay idk make them think their computer cannot interpret the character :P
@@InfinitiaterYT huh ok
㍼
As a Chinese, two of these characters are common, "閏" and "祢". Others are often borrowed from the pronunciation of the main part and combined with various strange symbols, which are called "Mars characters". For example, "彁暃蟐帥（哥非常帥）" means "brother (me) is very handsome"
Talking about Kanji without mentioning its Chinese origin is wild when Kanji literally means "Han Characters" thus "Chinese characters"
And just like other languages, words get obsoleted and no longer been used so some characters lost its meaning in the process, and sometimes, it might be a writing mistake through transcriptions.
Exactly. I found that strange when he introducing kanji without mentioning Chinese(Hanzi) in the first place. XD
Typical of western media, they don’t know that most traditional Japanese/koreans/East Asian culture up until the last 200-300 years originated from China
Right? Hes making it seem like Han characters are from Japan
@@bryonwhite6359 Yea this makes me feel weird and the guy behind HAI probably has prejudice against China I am afraid
This is so fascinating! Especially the photocopying part.
the pronunciation of 彁 in Chinese is "ge", which be used in the ancient books of Han Dynasty like:《後漢書·張衡列傳》屑瑤繠以為彁兮，巩白水以為漿。 or: 《通典·乘勝》:至高壁嶺，總管劉弘執馬而諫曰：「彁糧已竭，士卒疲頓，願且停營，待兵糧咸集，而後決戰。」
So why did you guys say this Kanji is meaningless?
It is not. Those are errors made by OCR. The correct word here is 糇 instead of 彁.
no? both of these use these because the symbol looks kinda like the original incomprehensiable symbols
@@gudmansal3468 meh Chinese people won't create the characters that they needn't
@@akito14 they created at least a few hundred of these
This is why I love chinese characters. It feels much more like a rabbit hole than other writing systems, the fact that there's probably STILL thousands of unknown characters ready to be discovered is exhillarating! I look at it like a secret entrance to another world of linguistics :>
These are the HAI videos I subscribe for😄
me too
This was almost a "Tale of Tiffany" level story!
6:20 this is the same reason that fan favourite, ꙮ recently got more eyes. The guy that encoded the original and made the first font for it had a bad scan, and created a font for that, which he then submitted to Unicode. Later, somebody found a better scan which had MORE EYES and was EVEN BIGGER. So there is a correction to the Unicode standard to give that character MORE EYES (Unicode does allow changes to glyphs in their code charts!)
This reminds me of how Taiwanese people use the character 水 (water) as texting slang for 媠 (beautiful) because, while 媠 is the correct character for the common word for “beautiful” in Hokkien dialects, it hasn’t been used in Mandarin writings in centuries. Because the characters and keyboards were all built for Mandarin, it’s really hard to easily type 媠, but it’s really easy to type 水, which happens to have similar pronunciation in Hokkien
Macauley Culkin 😂
What's interesting is how number 8 looks to me (a non Japanese person) a lot like the symbol for open/closed/locked/unlocked that a lot of Japanese doors have on it.
E
You're thinking of 開 and 閉. That's cuz 門 means "door". It's one of those radical things that Sam mentioned in the vid that can sort of allow you to guess what a word means.
Do you mean the Arabic 8 or the Japanese 8 (八)? And what does it look like? 開? 閉? Or is it not a kanji character?
@@Chicken_o7 Yeah. That was my understanding too. It looks like it's in some form related to doors. Reading the wiki, it's suspected of being a typo.
@@Chicken_o7 That's correct
One of the first things you learn when learning kanji is to avoid extrapolating the meaning based on the radicals that make it up. Asking what a radical means would be like asking what the letter "b" means. It means nothing on it's own, it just makes up other words.
IIRC there's a related phenomenon of ghost characters that I don't remember the name, but it's basically characters that we only have one example of usage, i.e. there's only one source where we could find it, and it appears there only once. We can sort of understand them by context, but we don't know for sure.
Those are called 'Hapax legomena.'
@@BirdieRumia Thanks!
Nearly half of Japanese ghost Kanji are confirmed to have been found in obscure Chinese or Korean sources -- often as misspellings or local alternative forms, including 妛. However, the Japanese 妛 seems to have been recorded independently. It is also possible that Japan's extensive archives of Chinese (yes, Japan preserved thousands of ancient Chinese books of which no originals in China have been found) and Manyōgana texts inevitably contained non-standard Kanji that somehow influenced the record keeping.
Okay hold up Sam, and this better go in a correction vid, but the unicode standard doesn't encode "all" the characters and symbols and "all" the words languages (Video timestamp. 3:50).There are tons of languages that for whatever reason haven't been deemed "important enough" to encode and then there are also tons of languages that still don't have a written form, not to mention the fact that there are probably still some undiscovered natural languages out there.
I remember seeing a related article on Asahi Shinbun (in Japanese) as part of a series about Japanese linguistics some time ago. About 彁 in particular, they found out through an OCR reserch of old newspapers scans in their archives one instance of it inside a 1923 newspaper (the article about the finding comes up on top of a Google search just by inputing 彁 朝日新聞).
Well, it turns out that, in that specific case, it was just the old, pre-reform kanji 彊 (now 強, meaning strong), just scrunched and faded-out.
I assume all the other ghost kanjis all come from similar misreadings of old printed materials, it's all a matter of figuring out what they actually were originally.
1:57 from the Chinese I know, I'm pretty sure that means politics instead of government.
government is 政府
"If you know it, you know it. And if you don't, you don't." Great quote man, great quote 👏
Space Battleship Yamato introduced a character called 玲 by the fact that nobody would get her name right.
玲 would usually be read Rei, as many characters with 令 in them are. So everyone assumes that's her name.
But it turns out that her name is actually read Akira because screw you.
It also has the extremely useful meaning of "sound of gemstones".
I like SH玲's songs
Presumably it is the onomatopoeia for jingling gemstones, so like the word "bling". Not as silly as it might look at first!
Hey that's my Chinese name! 刘玲玲，Liu Lingling, and yep, it's the onomatopeiac (spelling?), the sound of jade! ❤
@@isoraqathedhyep, that's it!
"Akira" can be written with many many many different kanjis with different meanings each
I really don't think the "needle in a haystack" metaphor needs a modern update. Looking for a needle in a haystack would be a nightmare not just because of it being a small object in a large pile, but also due to the needle being a sharp object which could easily hurt the searcher.
When I wss in Japan, we used to make fun of "uso-ji" 嘘字 (literally fake characters), like extremely complex with 100+ strokes, and we knew: they are not real XD
Kanji is old because it came from our Chinese language. In Simplified Chinese, it's 汉语 (hànzì). In traditional Chinese, it's 漢字 (hànzì). 漢字 (hànzì) means "Chinese characters" in English. It specifically refers to the logographic characters used in the writing systems of the Chinese language and its derivatives. Each 漢字 typically represents a morpheme or a unit of meaning, and they are used in writing across various East Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. The strokes and structures of 漢字 are intricate and hold significant cultural and linguistic importance in East Asia. Historically, 漢字 (hànzì), or Chinese characters, signify several important aspects:
1. Cultural Heritage: 漢字 have been used for thousands of years in China and neighboring countries. They carry a rich cultural heritage, representing the history, literature, and traditions of East Asian civilizations.
2. Unified Writing System: 漢字 historically provided a unified writing system across regions with diverse spoken languages in East Asia. This facilitated communication and cultural exchange among different ethnic groups.
3. Scholarly Tradition: The mastery of 漢字 was traditionally a mark of education and literacy in East Asian societies. Knowledge of 漢字 was essential for accessing classical texts, philosophy, and administrative documents.
4. Artistic Expression: The calligraphy of 漢字 has been considered an art form in itself, with skilled calligraphers admired for their mastery of brush strokes and artistic expression.
5. International Influence: 漢字 have influenced the writing systems of neighboring countries such as Japan (kanji), Korea (hanja), and Vietnam (Hán tự). This influence extends to cultural practices, literature, and even modern technological advancements.
6. Evolution and Adaptations: Over time, 漢字 have evolved in form and usage, reflecting changes in language, society, and technological advancements. Despite adaptations and simplifications (as seen in simplified Chinese characters), the fundamental structure and historical significance of 漢字 remain deeply rooted in East Asian cultures.
Overall, 漢字 historically signifies a profound cultural, linguistic, and artistic legacy that continues to shape East Asian societies and influence global perceptions of Asian heritage.
Deprecated characters could probably be used to make custom symbols in a font for a game or something.
I hereby define that character, because it has the radicals for oneself and song, to mean bad karaoke music.
The Council approves of this decision
“Jinmei” means “People’s Names” and indicates that people’s names can only use the Kanji in that block. The other block is of other common use Kanji that are not allowed to be used for a person’s name. For example, a couple wanted to name their daughter “strawberry” but the Kanji for strawberry, though common, is not a Jinmei Kanji and though they sued in court, they were still not allowed to use the Kanji for strawberry for their daughter’s name.
nah those are eldritch horrors documented as symbols
0:04 as a verified Chinese person, I only know one of the characters mean
which one?
@@Ricky_69蟐 is a bug
Me too
嫦
Hi Sam!
Big shoutouts to Amy for 彁. She deserves a raise!
just noticed an error, your using the logo for the academic network in the UK the Joint Information Systems Committee instead of the one for the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee
I have been learning Chữ Nôm for quite a while and "槞" actually means "trồng" in Vietnamese (*to plant* a tree)
1:45 that character means Chinese, and together they means… Chinese characters, maybe simply… Chinese, sigh.
Actually the water radical in 漢 is easy to explain. The original meaning of 漢 is the name of a river, the Han river, located in central China, and the surrounding land was then called 漢中, and the guy who ruled that land was called 漢王 (the lord of Han). 劉邦(Liu Bang) became the lord of Han in 206 BCE, and later conquer the whole China and became the new emperor in 202 BCE. He named his regime over his old fief, 漢朝 (Han Dynasty), which became the first golden age of Chinese history, mirroring the Roman Empire on the other side of the continent at the same time.
Sine the Han Dynasty, the Chinese people start referring themselves as 漢人(Han people, or Han Chinese), and all their stuff as Han-something. And that's how the name 漢字(Han zi) came to be, and Kanji is just the Japanese pronunciation.
So yeah, that's how the word for Kanji is related to water.
Clickbait, this video was at least two-thirds as interesting!
I heard this from my Japanese instructor that even during the Edo period, there were Kanji characters that were written differently region by region and those obscure Kanji characters became semi-normal in a certain prefecture of today. Some of the most unusual ones are for placenames in Japan. Those extremely obscure ones would likely came from Japanese style Kanji cursives.
It's also generally difficult for Japan to adopt better civic organizational systems due to maintaining the Meiji era prefecture system (都道府県, todōfuken) to this day that doesn't streamline municipal-level government works that easily. Hence a lot of minor errors in reading and writing Kanji characters popping up to this day.
If anybody would learn Japanese very seriously, some of you may notice that today's Japan still has these uncomfortable late 19th century vibes in the society and among individuals.
Appreciate your authenticity, keep being real
Ah yes, my favorite LeaF song! It's called... uhhhhh.... well..... hmmmmmm...
彁
(pronounced か)
@@jan_Eten Google Translate on drugs as usual and thinks 彁 is pronounced "hikaru"
Edit: Also translated か (ka) to "?"
@fandroid6491 it translating ka to a question sorta makes sense because when you use ka at the end of a sentence it turns it into a question.
その文字は漢字です
More stuff I have never thought about but am now intrigued! Thanks HAI.
Brilliant idea for a tattoo to confuse locals as a tourist.
kanji=汉字=the character of Han people. Han people are a group of people originated from a river in china. The name of that river? You guessed it! Han! now you know why there is a water radical in the word Kanji. :) similarly in 治, this character originally meant to control the flood (大禹治水）. Again actually the water radicals make sense there. There has been extensive discussion on Chinese Quora (Zhihu) whether any chinese character with a water radical means something related to water. The answer is loosely yes, pretty much all chinese characters with a water radical originally meant something loosely related to water.
Of all the channels I watch, this was one of the LAST ones I expected to find a Jojo reference!
I don't read/speak Japanese, have never been/not currently planning on going to Japan - but it warms the cockles for you have covered this topic.
Thanks Sam, another thing I didn't know I didn't know ticked off the list :)
waiting for this channel to discover 変体仮名 (not writing the english transliteration because it will probably get flagged by youtube lol)
妛-chī
挧-yǔ (Meaning Lingering in Japanese and meaning hammer in Chinese and meaning pan in Cantonese)
暃-fēi (meaning dawn in Chinese and meaning sun in english)
椦-quan (Meaning Palm Trees)
槞-lóng (Meaning Oak)
祢-mí (Meaning You [probably used in old times])
閠-rùn (Meaning Close in Cantonese and Meaning eunuch in Chinese)
駲-zhōu (Meaning Mistletoe in Chinese and Meaning gun in Japanese)
墸-zhù (Meaning always in Japanese)
壥-chán (Meaning Can (noun) in Chinese and Bag in Japanese)/(Meaning stepping back in Japanese)
彁-gē
蟐-chàng (Meaning Toad in Japanese)
This seems like a great chance for someone to seize the character for their own and add meaning to it
@1:58 that term 政治 means “politics” instead of government. The Kanji for government is 政府
Not a big stretch as 政治家 is politician. WWWJDIC also lists politics as a meaning
The mystery kanji character means jojo worm 🤣
I wonder if anyone bothered to look through Vietnamese characters (chữ nôm). When Vietnam used Chinese characters, they also created many new ones for Vietnamese words.
Wikipedia says: "In contrast to the few hundred Japanese kokuji (国字) and handful of Korean gukja (국자, 國字), which are mostly rarely used characters for indigenous natural phenomena, Vietnamese scribes created thousands of new characters, used throughout the language."
I found 槞 in a chữ nôm dictionary as trồng (to cultivate).
em effer just made a whole comprehensive overview of the japanese writing system to talk about this one kanji character