Investigation Into Using the Unicode Standard for Primitives of Unified Han Characters

PACLIC 28 !129 Investigation Into Using the Unicode Standard for Primitives of Unified Han Characters Henry Larkin Deakin University Melbourne, Australia henry.larkin@deakin.edu.au Abstract The Unicode standard identifies and provides representation of the vast majority of known characters used in today’s writing systems. Many of these characters belong to the unified Han series, which encapsulates characters from writing systems used in languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. These pictographic characters are often made up of smaller primitives, either other characters or more simplified pictography. This paper presents research findings of how the Unicode standard currently represents the primitives used in 4134 of the most common Han characters. 1 Introduction The Unicode standard has made great strides in its ability to provide a single reference for indexing written characters in the world’s languages. Several of these languages contain characters that are built up of other characters. This is especially true of the unified Han subset of the Unicode standard, which focuses on characters largely used within Japanese kanji, Chinese hanzi, and Korean hanja. These character sets are used in several languages in numerous regions in Asia. While the Unicode standard has been working towards creating a unified character set, from a research perspective there is an area of research open to explore what parts of characters might contain sub- characters (primitives), and how these primitives are represented. These primitives can be either whole characters in and of themselves, or primitive glyphs either in the form of simplified representations of actual characters, or common symbols which, by themselves, traditionally have only a vague or perhaps non-existent meaning. This is especially important to dictionary, research and language-learning projects, where the breakdown of primitives is greatly beneficial. Some work has been done in this area before, particularly from the point of view of language learners. The work of Dr. Heisig [1][2] has made great strides in identifying common primitives within Chinese and Japanese characters. However, majority of these primitives are drawn as images and have no representation in the Unicode standard or are not referenced from the Unicode standard. Furthermore, previous research has not explored a comprehensive analysis of which primitives are used most commonly and in what positions of the character they are most commonly found. The purpose of this work is to explore the possibility of using the Unicode standard for all primitive characters. 2 Process This research project looked at six Asian language character sets in order to investigate whether it is possible to use Unicode characters to describe the primitives that make up each character. Six language sets were considered in total. Copyright 2014 by Henry Larkin 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 129–134 PACLIC 28 !130 • JOYO is the official kanji character set as described by the government of Japan containing 2136 characters units when including the latest updates from 2010. • JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) is a character set used specifically for learners of Japanese. It differs from the JOYO character …

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