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> I know 彁 isn't real: but it still insists on a pronunciation: ka in Japanese, (gē or gé Mandarin).

Huh? How do you pronounce 切?

> And it hints at meaning: bowed weapon, sound, elder brother; but your guess is as good as mine!

Why is "elder brother" a meaning hint if you've already assumed that 哥 is the phonophore?

Isn't that backwards? The nonexistent character is in the -digitized- version so presumably OCR or something got 彊 wrong, that's not saying that 彁 was used in the -print- version.

Indeed, the source link is about exactly this: a crappy scan appears to have 彁 but a better copy reveals it was 彊.

Not exactly, it doesn't look like the definition or even connotations of "ineffable" include "unknown".

Yes. As far as I understood it, the result was an incoherent mess.

I think some characters got different code points, while others were merged. And apparently the Japanese complained bitterly over the ones that were merged. If you had read any articles about that, this is probably what you have in mind right now.

And I'm also a bit tilted by the ones that had different code points, because when processing CJK text now we have to deal with characters that are (in my native Cantonese) essentially the same, looks similar (to my undiscriminating eyes), yet having different code points so that things like text search sometimes don't work.

Of course I'm not "blaming" the Japanese, if anything the simplified vs traditional Chinese thing is much more of a practical problem, and the conflicting code points I deal with on a routine basis are more of a Hong Kong vs Taiwan thing, but I was told that the Unified CJK thing adopted a different "philosophy" from the rest of Unicode (which I think really is some kind of Aristotelian essentialism...) mostly due to vocal objections from the Japanese.

Meanwhile, Latin a and Cyrillic а, which look identical, have the same origin and are often pronounced identically too, get separate codepoints. CJK unification was not based on any clear preestablished principles but simply an attempt to cling to 16-bit codepoints, Asian languages be damned.

It is a blunder that Japan could not see that they just copied other characters in to JIS and it’s also why we see duplicated Romaji characters within Unicode. The duplication is frankly bad regardless of number of bits need to encode although with 16 it was indeed a requirement.

Not everything is upper/lower convertible like ß for example (as far as I know)

At least until 2017, I imagine there are others though.

> In 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a capital form ⟨ẞ⟩ as an acceptable variant, ending a long debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F

(Talking about Japanese here)

I don't know if this is how OCR would work here, but they're made of components called radicals. It's kind of like how letters make words, but in a two dimensional layout, and one letter was wrong and a nonexistent word was made.

For example 彁 is made of parts of 引 and 歌 (the first that popped into my mind).

IIRC there's only like 200-something radicals, though some can be hard to spot due to how they overlap or nest inside each other.

"slow" - wasn't like they were pressed for time. It took them almost 20years to even start the investigation! Also not certain you needed that much reliability compared to what was available to match one pic to a quality scan to get a reasonable number of candidates

It's something! I propose that the first 4 of those characters should in English be called Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.

I have it it in my .XCompose as

    <Multi_key> <c> <c> <c> <p> : "\xe2\x98\xad" #symbol representing proletarian solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers

As a slightly related tangent, The compose key mnemonic interface for rarely used characters is pretty great, beats trying to remember alt codes.

Figures, it's a capitalist website after all...