Slashdot Mirror
Official Kanji Count Increasing Due To Electronics
JoshuaInNippon writes "Those who have studied Japanese know how imposing kanji, or Chinese characters, can be in learning the language. There is an official list of 1,945 characters that one is expected to understand to graduate from a Japanese high school or be considered fluent. For the first time in 29 years, that list is set to change — increasing by nearly 10% to 2,136 characters. 196 are being added, and five deleted. The added characters are ones believed to be found commonly in life use, but are considered to be harder to write by hand and therefore overlooked in previous editions of the official list. Japanese officials seem to have recognized that with the advent and spread of computers in daily life, writing in Japanese has simplified dramatically. Changing the phonetic spelling of a word to its correct kanji only requires a couple of presses of a button, rather than memorizing an elaborate series of brush strokes. At the same time, the barrage of words that people see has increased, thereby increasing the necessity to understand them. Computers have simplified the task of writing in Japanese, but inadvertently now complicated the lives of Japanese language learners. (If you read Japanese and are interested in more details on specific changes, Slashdot.jp has some information!)"
Kanji are words, they're just words whose "spelling" is entirely unrelated to their pronunciation.
Hiragana or Katakana are the equivalent of English letters, and nobody's suggesting that those ever change.
Not really, Kanji have "ON" and "KUN" readings. One is for full words, others is to mix with other kanjis and make other words. Forgot which is which, but in many cases kanji can serve the same use as kana.
The usual explanation given is that people were injecting unicode characters as part of trolling attempts to break Slashdot's layout. So trolls were doing things like using right-to-left control characters to spoof their comment score. See this comment, which explains the situation and links to some examples. Slashdot reacted by blocking anything not in the basic character set.
Frankly this is an unsatisfying answer. Or rather an unsatisfying solution. It seems like it wouldn't take that long for a developer to go through some of the unicode set and build a whitelist and/or blacklist that was comprehensive enough to allow us geeks to use useful symbols (currency, micro, greek letters, etc.) without allowing damaging characters.
It seems like many of Slashdot's anti-trolling features (e.g. trying to prevent allcaps or ASCII art) are somewhat misguided. Nowadays the moderation is pretty good, such that troll comments are basically buried. You may as well let regular posters with good karma post in caps or use ASCII art if that's what their post requires (e.g. posting some calculations that uses lots of symbols and few words ends up being flagged unnecessarily).
All that to say that Slashdot could presumably fix these things, but apparently they have little interest in doing so.
Boy, this is really going to blow your mind when you realize that the English alphabet you're typing in is a modified form of the Latin alphabet, which was a borrowed and changed form of the Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscans had of course borrowed and modified the Greek alphabet (get it, Alpha Beta??). The Greeks had taken the Phoenician Alphabet, "bastardized" and "basically copied" and "changed it at it's [sic] will." The Phoenicians were uncreative hacks as well, and starting from Egyptian hieroglyphics just changed it without any respect to the original creators.
Now we're talking about 3000+ years of bastardization, copying, and changing at will (irony? no), so the evidence is a little shaky, but who knows who the Egyptians shamelessly copied from? Probably the Sumerians. Awful.
Some information for you...truly independent creations of writing systems have been rather rare worldwide. Take for instance Mongolian script. It looks pretty unusual right? Pretty geographically isolated area, far from e.g. the Middle East. Possibly unique? Nope. The Mongols (an Altaic language) borrowed from the Uyghurs (a Turkic language) who borrowed from the Sogdians (an Indo-European language) who borrowed from Syriac (Semitic language) and Aramaic. And so on, further and further back.
That process of bastardization, copying, and changing at will is how knowledge and language and culture throughout history has progressed. The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.