In 1978 Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange – several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters.
Fascinating story.
That’s pretty much par for the course for the history of characters of Chinese origin.
Errors in analysis and copying over time would create new characters out of thin air.
Now that they have the characters, they need to find their meanings.
They are typos, maybe one of them means “covfefe”.
Forgot about this one, thanks for the reminder.
or cafe babe
See also the https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto… .
One of the reasons countries using character-based alphabets are better at software is because character-based alphabets map intuitively to the “string of bytes” concept (with each byte able to represent a relatively small number of well-defined symbols). Compare this with Japanese, where even native speakers can’t produce a full list of their alphabet out of memory and strokes are combined in weird ways to produce the symbols.
Of course, programmers using a character-based alphabet have a hard time understanding concepts like the text flow changing direction mid-stream (which leads to localisation mistakes). It’s extremely counter-intuitive to them (us).
Edited 2018-07-31 22:35 UTC
That’s not how kanji are constructed in the first place. You don’t “produce” symbols. All kanji have a set form, representing a “word”. The word doesn’t get any meaning from stroke combination – it is the whole word and nothing but the word.
Kanji has the concept of stroke order, but those are just historical ways of manually writing the character, and impart no meaning otherwise. There is no “combination”.
The only thing reminiscent of “combination” is the use of radicals, but you still don’t “produce symbols” from combining radicals*. The word is the word.
* Unless you learn Cantonese, in which case you can “produce” a new symbol by combining a word with the mouth radical to indicate part of vernacular speech which has the same sound as the word, but none of the meaning. However, this is used only for very informal writing. You would still use the standard words in semi-formal to formal writing.
I believe stroke order is also relevant to the sorting order in kanji dictionaries, but it’s been years, so I may be mis-remembering.
Edited 2018-08-01 10:32 UTC
And alphabets are wellknown to be derived from the consonant only semitic alphabets.
Did you really forget how great the Japanese are at games? Thousand upon thousands of them…