Chinese Characters and Dictionaries
nickdrozd.github.io
nickdrozd.github.io
In question 12, you can get a little pedantic about the different versions of the character for national.
The following 3 characters are all “National”
- 囯 modern, simplified Chinese version
- 国 modern, somewhat simplified Japanese version
- 國 traditional, Chinese version
As noted several times, different fonts can carry different looking versions of characters, but to make things even more complicated, same Unicode code points can refer to different versions of the same character! Let that sink in for a minute.
Imagine if the codepoint for “a” could refer to both “a” and “A”!
This makes it really difficult to discuss minute differences between characters without having to refer to pictures of them.
But if 囯 is nonstandard, how did the author end up writing that one? I mean, it is easy to do when handwriting, but these kinds of mistakes are usually much more difficult on a computer
From what I can tell though, the word "nonstandard" isn't very helpful in this context, because there are few universal standards, even when it comes to something as simple as counting strokes. A "nonstandard" character might actually be well-attested in some particular time and place, or in some particular dictionary tradition. I don't know if that applies to this case, but it might.