Richard wrote:
> The character has three drops of water on
> its left side.
Ah, so it is U+2405D.
Once again, you've stumbled across one of those characters that is hard to
get information on. I would advise checking the unihan.txt file first,
since the characters in chinalanguage.com's dictionary are simply the ones
in a character set (for computers), and character sets for computers can
and do contain weird characters (including mistakes). If it's in a dictionary
like the _Kangxi Zidian_ or the _Hanyu Da Zidian_, etc., then we can look it
up, but otherwise, there's really no easy way to really find out what a
character really is.
unihan.txt[1] says only this:
>U+2405D kIRGKangXi 0657.361
>U+2405D kIRG_TSource F-554D
>U+2405D kRSKangXi 85.14
>U+2405D kRSUnicode 85.14
That means, it is not in the _Kangxi Zidian_ (----.--1), but it would be after
the 36th (----.36-) character on (modern) p. 657 (0657.---) if it were. It
comes from Plane 0Fh (decimal 15) of CNS 11643-1986. And it is filed under
radical #85 (水), with 14 residual strokes (for 閩).
It is probably just some character dug out of the Taiwan government's records.
[1] You can get it from
http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/ .
> The other 2 variants that I've mentioned here
> are not in this website's ccdict nor on any other ccdict.
> Btw, why isn't the ancient form of min considered to be
> another separate character?
If the "ancient form" is composed of the same pieces, then there's really
nothing different about the character--if the "ancient form" of 閩 is just
the "ancient form" of 門 plus the "ancient form" of 虫, then you probably
won't find a separate entry. It's usually only if there is some kind of
large difference, like 之 and ㄓ, that the "ancient form" (古文) is listed
seperately. But I don't know what the criteria is--certainly, 雨 'rain' and
its "ancient form" U+20572 are structurally similar?
> what are the other ways to look
> for in considering a character as a separate one?
This is not a simple issue. Would you have considered 內 and U+5185 to be
one or two different characters? Most likely, one, but Unicode choose to
encode them as two. But for 直 (U+76F4), there's more than one possible
for it (and they are somewhat different-looking), and some people would've
said they were two[2].
I would read chapter 10 "East Asian Scripts" of the Unicode 3.0 book to
understand how Unicode handles matters (which may not be how any other
dictionary might handle it), especially about the 3-dimensional model,
component structure, unification, etc.
[2] I've got some scans from various sources at
http://deall.ohio-state.edu/grads/chan.200/cjkv/u76f4/ .
[3]
http://www.unicode.org/uni2book/ch10.pdf
> does it
> mean that if there aren't any appendices about its variants
> in the hanyu da zidian,no variants of the character exist?
> I'm really so sure that I saw the other 2 characters on t.v.
> They were clasified on the mountain bushou.
That just means the index contains omissions (remember a while ago
when you asked me about variants of 岷, and through reading the entries,
I found a variant that wasn't listed in the HYDZD variant index?), or that
the dictionary compilers didn't know about the character (for example, many
Cantonese dialect characters are not in the _Hanyu Da Zidian_, although almost
any Cantonese speaker is familiar with them).
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu