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New Unicode Bug Discovered For Common Japanese Character "No"

Posted by timothy on from the perfectly-nice-in-garbage-out dept.

AmiMoJo writes: Some users have noticed that the Japanese character "no", which is extremely common in the Japanese language (forming parts of many words, or meaning something similar to the English word "of" on its own). The Unicode standard has apparently marked the character as sometimes being used in mathematical formulae, causing it to be rendering in a different font to the surrounding text in certain applications. Similar but more widespread issues have plagued Unicode for decades due to the decision to unify dissimilar characters in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

4 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Why not just use English, and only English? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There are more native Chinese speaker than English speaker. How about you learn Chinese and shut the fuck up?

  2. Re: Why not just use English, and only English? by John+Allsup · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just write chinese in pinyin and speak it normally. (the number of Chinese speakers does not matter, the issue is with how it is written down.) When it comes to ideograph based languages, we would have been better off designing an entirely separate text system rather than trying to shoehorn it into a font-character paradigm derived from the needs of writing and printing latin scripts. Indeed having a writing system designed around the needs of calligraphy would be a useful thing, but like with ideograph based writing systems it is a long way from the use case we normally see with alphabet based writing systems.

    --
    John_Chalisque
  3. Re: Why not just use English, and only English? by amake · · Score: 2, Insightful

    we would have been better off

    No, you might have been better off. Chinese speakers would not. They would like to use their written language, as it exists today, on computers just like everyone else.

  4. Can anyone illustrate? by BlueMonk · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have been reading the comments for 20 minutes because I don't understand Japanese, but I still don't understand the problem. There's a Japanese character called no, it looks very much like a lowercase English/Latin "e" rotated clockwise about 80 degrees and then flipped over the vertical axis. Is this being mixed up with something else or rendered wrongly? Can anybody provide examples of what it's getting mixed up with or how or where it's being rendered improperly?