An encounter with Chinese graphical convergence
Greetings fellow sinologists / Chinese language lovers.
I am compiling a large amount of data for a project and it requires me to go through a bunch of Chinese character data. It's very lonely work and not many people around me are as nerdy about it as I am, and so I thought I'd reach out to this community and share with you an anecdote of one of the strange things I come across in my work. This particular phenomenon is called something like graphical convergence or just standardization (something like the process simplification went through).
My latest encounter, just minutes ago was with this character 具 which looks like it's made up of something like 目 一 八 (in the unihan database which I work with daily it's identified under the 八 radical. But delving into my favorite website dict.variants.moe.edu.tw, I came to discover that what looks something like a 目 is not an eye, but instead is a reduced form of an older character 貝, that used to mean a type of shell used as currency which was used as currency / for trade (see this link for details, couldn't share the screenshot due to Reddit blocking it). https://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/dictView.jsp?ID=2786
Not only that, but the extending legs like the 八 component of the 貝 are not what is connecting to that bottom separating 一 stroke, because remember the 貝 is a reduced form that looks like 目 🤣🤣🤣 confused yet?
Instead, what is causing the appearance of that extra horizontal 一 stroke (count them, 1, 2, 3 in the middle right?) is actually the top portion of this ancient component 廾, which itself has now converged into 一 and 八.
Long story short, it's not technically what it looks like. As you can imagine this has happened a lot with the Chinese language and for me and my purposes of uses unicode glyphs, it is a source of intrigue and anguish. Indeed the Taiwanese Ministry of Education (and I assume other similar sino-sphere institutions as well) have identified this and made rules about the stroke order and convention of these characters.
Dunno if that was interesting for you, but at least I can share these crazy things with the world of Reddit.
AI is very handy in translating the Chinese there as it is very academic and old school (and above my level 😅).