Han Unification: not violent, just really inconvenient

#unicode #chinese #history #classicalchinese #linguistics

@0xabad1dea Those are some very white faces for representing a group of people making decisions about how to best map chinese, japanese and korean characters.

@Owlor just to be 100% clear, this isn't literally the meeting where it happened a few decades ago, just the first photo I found of a Unicode meeting where there's a sign saying it's a Unicode meeting.

I don't know who was involved in the decision, though there's probably a record somewhere.

@0xabad1dea A lot of the CJK work is on the ISO side, see https://www.unicode.org/irg/.

On the UTC side, see the relevant WG https://www.unicode.org/consortium/cjkunihan.html.

On the history see https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/core-spec/appendix-e/.

Henry Chan (now IRG ORT manager) had a interesting thread on Twitter on the necessity of unification, see https://web.archive.org/web/20220115002546/https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/1455676926568271873. See also https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn26/.

Ideographic Research Group

@0xabad1dea I don’t know if there are photos online of the CJK-JRG 1991 Tokyo meeting. The earliest IRG meeting with group photos on https://www.unicode.org/irg/meetings.html is Macao 2002. So « what actually happened » might look more like this, although that photo is still ten years later: