Hi all. Today I ran into a frustrating occurrence that seems to appear occasionally as I progress with kanji. So far I know about 1300 kanji well, and I’m seeing it more and more so wanted to clarify before I got too much further.
The cases I’m referring to are where kanji I already know are combined with a radical to make another kanji, but change ever so slightly as part of the combination. The example in the title of 尊 and 噂 got me started down this path, because I googled 噂 and some of the pictures of it had the right side written as 尊. Others I can think of include 包 and 鞄 and 肖 and 蛸.
Looking into the *why* further, I stumbled upon the Japanese Industrial Standard 2004 change to character sets ([0213:2004](https://kakijun.jp/main/jis2004.html)). To me, it looks like the characters I listed *used to* match their source kanji, but [diverged](https://kakijun.jp/img/jis2004-168.gif) in this update. I was surprised to see characters like 飴 and 餌 used to display with the same left side as 飲, but no longer do. It is as if the simplification that occured to 飲 was applied to 飴 and 餌 pre 2004 and then was reverted.
Is this just a case where character display was limited pre-2004 for characters that were not part of Jōyō and Jinmeiyō simplification efforts? Looking at the image I linked above, it looks like the 2004 update made all of the characters more complicated similar to pre-simplification Jōyō and Jinmeiyō kanji.
My brain hates everything about this, yet I can’t expect to change it so I must live with it and that requires understanding. I appreciate your time, thanks for any replies.
2 comments
Many, many characters change when combined into larger characters. For example, the radical in characters like 腕 and 肢 is actually 肉 and not 月…
Outside of the character display issue on PCs, I’m going to reply to my own thread with my hypothesis of why 尊 and 噂 actually differ:
Some kanji like 蛸 were not simplified to be consistent with the simplifications their source kanji received, such as 肖. I will just have to remember both variants for at minimum recognition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai