Kingdom of Characters

What Hacker News says

1. whakimDec 2023
   Storage limitations from the 80's (as described by sibling comments) is one reason, but there's also another: which characters are considered their own graph (versus variants) is a somewhat fraught geopolitical issue, especially when China and Taiwan are on opposite sides of the argument. The final chapter of Yale professor Jing Tsu's Kingdom of Characters does a great job laying out how this manifests itself at meetings of Unicode working groups.
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2. uniqueuidFeb 2022
   A big reason is of course the possibility of using arbitrarily complex letters or symbols, thus allowing Kanji (and Hanzi) to be used.

   I'm reading a book right now on the difficulty that Hanzi brought to the developing china of the early 20th century [1]. The difficulties are all mostly predictable - cultural attachment, the fragmentation of languages and dialects, transliteration of tonal variants, finding a large enough keyboard etc.

   But there are some interesting things I didn't know, for example that there were attempts to decompose symbols into radicals that could be combined.

   [1] Jing Tsu: Kingdom of Characters.

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