Editing Han unification (section)

===Unihan "abstract characters"===
{{More citations needed section|date=May 2025}}
Since the Unihan standard encodes "abstract characters", not "glyphs", the graphical artifacts produced by Unicode have been considered temporary technical hurdles, and at most, cosmetic. However, again, particularly in Japan, due in part to the way in which Chinese characters were incorporated into Japanese writing systems historically, the inability to specify a particular variant was considered a significant obstacle to the use of Unicode in scholarly work. For example, the unification of "grass" (explained above), means that a historical text cannot be encoded so as to preserve its peculiar orthography. Instead, for example, the scholar would be required to locate the desired glyph in a specific typeface in order to convey the text as written, defeating the purpose of a unified character set. Unicode has responded to these needs by assigning variation selectors so that authors can select grapheme variations of particular ideographs (or even other characters).<ref name="UnicodeVariationSelectors" />

Small differences in graphical representation are also problematic when they affect legibility or belong to the wrong cultural tradition. Besides making some Unicode fonts unusable for texts involving multiple "Unihan languages", names or other orthographically sensitive terminology might be displayed incorrectly. (Proper names tend to be especially orthographically conservative—compare this to changing the spelling of one's name to suit a language reform in the US or UK.) While this may be considered primarily a graphical representation or rendering problem to be overcome by more artful fonts, the widespread use of Unicode would make it difficult to preserve such distinctions. The problem of one character representing semantically different concepts is also present in the Latin part of Unicode. The Unicode character for a curved apostrophe is the same as the character for a right single quote (’). On the other hand, the capital [[Latin script|Latin letter]] [[A]] is not unified with the [[Greek Alphabet|Greek letter]] [[Alpha|Α]] or the [[Cyrillic Alphabet|Cyrillic letter]] [[А (Cyrillic)|А]]. This is, of course, desirable for reasons of compatibility, and deals with a much smaller alphabetic character set.

While the unification aspect of Unicode is controversial in some quarters for the reasons given above, Unicode itself does now encode a vast number of seldom-used characters of a more-or-less antiquarian nature.

Some of the controversy stems from the fact that the very decision of performing Han unification was made by the initial Unicode Consortium, which at the time was a consortium of North American companies and organizations (most of them in California),<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.unicode.org/history/earlyyears.html|title=Early Years of Unicode|publisher=Unicode Consortium}}</ref> but included no East Asian government representatives. The initial design goal was to create a 16-bit standard,<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf|title=Unicode 88|first=Joseph D.|last=Becker|date=1998-08-29}}</ref> and Han unification was therefore a critical step for avoiding tens of thousands of character duplications. This 16-bit requirement was later abandoned, making the size of the character set less of an issue today.

The controversy later extended to the internationally representative ISO: the initial [[Ideographic Research Group|CJK Joint Research Group]] (CJK-JRG) favored a proposal (DIS 10646) for a non-unified character set, "which was thrown out in favor of unification with the Unicode Consortium's unified character set by the votes of American and European ISO members" (even though the Japanese position was unclear).<ref>{{cite web 
|url=http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unij.html |title=Unicode in Japan: Guide to a technical and psychological struggle |url-status=usurped |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090627072117/http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unij.html|archive-date=2009-06-27}}</ref> Endorsing the Unicode Han unification was a necessary step for the heated ISO 10646/Unicode merger.

Much of the controversy surrounding Han unification is based on the distinction between [[glyph]]s, as defined in Unicode, and the related but distinct idea of graphemes.{{citation needed|date=May 2025}} Unicode assigns abstract characters (graphemes), as opposed to glyphs, which are a particular visual representations of a character in a specific [[typeface]]. One character may be represented by many distinct glyphs, for example a "g" or an "a", both of which may have one loop (<span style="font-family:serif">{{IPA|ɑ}}</span>, <span style="font-family:serif">{{IPA|ɡ}}</span>) or two (<span style="font-family:serif">{{IPA|a}}</span>, <span style="font-family:serif">{{IPA|g}}</span>). Yet for a reader of Latin script based languages the two variations of the "a" character are both recognized as the same grapheme. Graphemes present in national character code standards have been added to Unicode, as required by Unicode's Source Separation rule, even where they can be composed of characters already available. The national character code standards existing in CJK languages are considerably more involved, given the technological limitations under which they evolved, and so the official CJK participants in Han unification may well have been amenable to reform.

Unlike European versions, CJK Unicode fonts, due to Han unification, have large but irregular patterns of overlap, requiring language-specific fonts. Unfortunately, language-specific fonts also make it difficult to access a variant which, as with the "grass" example, happens to appear more typically in another language style. (That is to say, it would be difficult to access "grass" with the four-stroke radical more typical of Traditional Chinese in a Japanese environment, which fonts would typically depict the three-stroke radical.) Unihan proponents tend to favor markup languages for defining language strings, but this would not ensure the use of a specific variant in the case given, only the language-specific font more likely to depict a character as that variant. (At this point, merely stylistic differences do enter in, as a selection of Japanese and Chinese fonts are not likely to be visually compatible.)

Chinese users seem to have fewer objections to Han unification,{{citation needed|date=May 2025}} largely because Unicode did not attempt to unify [[Simplified Chinese characters]] with [[Traditional Chinese characters]]. (Simplified Chinese characters are used among Chinese speakers in the [[People's Republic of China]], [[Singapore]], and [[Malaysia]]. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan ([[Big5]]) and they are, with some differences, more familiar to Korean and Japanese users.) Unicode is seen as neutral{{by whom|date=May 2025}} with regards to this politically charged issue, and has encoded Simplified and Traditional Chinese glyphs separately (e.g. the ideograph for "discard" is {{Lang|zh-Hant|丟}} U+4E1F for Traditional Chinese Big5 #A5E1 and {{Lang|zh-Hans|丢}} U+4E22 for Simplified Chinese GB #2210). It is also noted that Traditional and Simplified characters should be encoded separately according to Unicode Han Unification rules, because they are distinguished in pre-existing PRC character sets. Furthermore, as with other variants, Traditional to Simplified characters is not a one-to-one relationship.