The tag alias #58063 kanji -> chinese_character has been rejected.

Reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters

Chinese characters (traditional Chinese: 漢字; simplified Chinese: 汉字; pinyin: hànzì; Wade–Giles: han4 tzŭ4; Jyutping: hon3 zi6; lit. 'Han characters') are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese.[2][3] In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as kanji.

"Kanji" means "Chinese character" in Japanese, and Chinese characters are still Chinese even if they're used to write other languages. Besides, when they're isolated it is often not possible to tell which language they're supposed to be read in.

EDIT: The tag alias kanji -> chinese_character (forum #340143) has been rejected by @Rainbow_Dash.

gattonero2001 said:
"Kanji" means "Chinese character" in Japanese, and Chinese characters are still Chinese even if they're used to write other languages.

They have separated, though. There are kanji that are used in Japanese that aren't used in Chinese, and vice-versa, I'm quite sure. This would be like having english text tagged with "latin_character"; sure, english text is based upon latin script, but it's not wholly the same, new/alternate characters have been created for use in english that aren't in the original latin character set.

Besides which, "chinese_character" can be ambiguous. Someone can tag it thinking it's for "a character/person that is Chinese".

Theyre definitely not the same, they have different rules and different radicals.
This is ignorant at best and racist at worst.

watsit said:
They have separated, though. There are kanji that are used in Japanese that aren't used in Chinese, and vice-versa, I'm quite sure. This would be like having english text tagged with "latin_character"; sure, english text is based upon latin script, but it's not wholly the same, new/alternate characters have been created for use in english that aren't in the original latin character set.

An example of this mistaken usage can be seen in Soulcalibur V and VI. All of the Japanese text stickers that can be placed on custom characters have the label "Chinese Character". Even kana like ノ ("Chinese Character 66").

watsit said:
They have separated, though. There are kanji that are used in Japanese that aren't used in Chinese, and vice-versa, I'm quite sure.

Are isolated characters supposed to be identified and separated according to usage? Besides, there is significant overlap between the sets.

Right now, actual China-only characters are tagged kanji, which is simply inaccurate, while it is not inaccurate to say that all kanji are Chinese characters regardless of usage.

watsit said:
Besides which, "chinese_character" can be ambiguous. Someone can tag it thinking it's for "a character/person that is Chinese".

Nobody has ever had a reason to tag (nationality)_character to date, it seems unlikely that will change.

the format for written language is generally <language>_text why would we use <language>_character for Chinese?

darryus said:
the format for written language is generally <language>_text why would we use <language>_character for Chinese?

Please read the wiki page.

gattonero2001 said:
while it is not inaccurate to say that all kanji are Chinese characters regardless of usage.

what?

gattonero2001 said:
Right now, actual China-only characters are tagged kanji, which is simply inaccurate, while it is not inaccurate to say that all kanji are Chinese characters regardless of usage.

strikerman said:
what?

I was confused about that as well, since there are kanji that are Japanese-specific. I would not be surprised if the same was true of the Korean and Vietnamese equivalents.

strikerman said:
what?

Op is asserting that asia is a monolith because there is overlap in language.

demesejha said:
Theyre definitely not the same, they have different rules and different radicals.
This is ignorant at best and racist at worst.

strikerman said:
what?

Less uncharitable interpretation: I think they were referring back to "kanji" literally meaning "Chinese character(s)" in Japanese.

I'm not sure that argument would work, though, since "kanji" as a loan word in English only refers to the characters' usage in written Japanese.

gattonero2001 said:
while it is not inaccurate to say that all kanji are Chinese characters regardless of usage.

Yes it is inaccurate to say that. 鯰 (catfish) and 峠 (mountain pass) are examples of kanji that are not of Chinese origin. They are kanji that originated in Japan, and would be appropriate to tag them as kanji, but "chinese_character" would be wrong because they're not characters from China. Technically you may be able to alternatively call them kokuji, but I would never expect normal taggers (or even people who know kanji rather well) to know exactly which ones are kokuji and which aren't.

Funny enough, there are characters that are both kana (hiragana and katakana, the Japanese alphabet) and kanji. ニ is both the katakana for 'ni', but also the kanji for '2'. ニット is a Japanese transliteration of the word "knit" (nitto), while 二つ is a way to say "two" (futatsu). In the former case, it's a katakana character, in the latter it's a kanji character.

watsit said:
Yes it is inaccurate to say that. 鯰 (catfish) and 峠 (mountain pass) are examples of kanji that are not of Chinese origin. They are kanji that originated in Japan, and would be appropriate to tag them as kanji, but "chinese_character" would be wrong because they're not characters from China.

And this is why I feel like a country-neutral tag for all of these related languages would be more useful than aliasing to chinese_character, if we were really wanting to alias away kanji. Considering the current wiki seems to suggest it was meant for images where the specific language might be ambiguous, it feels weird to alias it to a tag that has "Chinese" right in the name, even if many of the characters originated in China.

Also, while I doubt anyone would use the tag to refer to it, I find it somewhat ironic that the Wikipedia article linked at the top outright has "For the moth known as the "Chinese character", see Cilix glaucata," written right at the top of it. Doesn't seem like this tag would make things less ambiguous than kanji.

vulkalu said:
And this is why I feel like a country-neutral tag for all of these related languages would be more useful than aliasing to chinese_character, if we were really wanting to alias away kanji.

I'd argue that kanji is the country-neutral term. If anything, chinese_character is the tag that should be aliased away, not kanji.

vulkalu said:
And this is why I feel like a country-neutral tag for all of these related languages would be more useful than aliasing to chinese_character, if we were really wanting to alias away kanji. Considering the current wiki seems to suggest it was meant for images where the specific language might be ambiguous, it feels weird to alias it to a tag that has "Chinese" right in the name, even if many of the characters originated in China.

I think the word "kanji" is well enough established in English to mean Chinese or Japanese ideograms. Just because the word itself is from Japan doesn't mean it can only refer to Japanese kanji.

If you really want to make it neutral, you could take the route Unicode does and call them "CJK Unified Ideographs".

lendrimujina said:
An example of this mistaken usage can be seen in Soulcalibur V and VI. All of the Japanese text stickers that can be placed on custom characters have the label "Chinese Character". Even kana like ノ ("Chinese Character 66").

Oof, what the hell is up with that localization team?

benjiboyo said:
Oof, what the hell is up with that localization team?

Tell me about it. You'd think they wouldn't make that mistake on a game created in Japan... anyway, it annoyed me so much that I made a mod to address it .

clawstripe said:
I'd argue that kanji is the country-neutral term. If anything, chinese_character is the tag that should be aliased away, not kanji.

Kanji only looks country-neutral because we Westerners have so much exposure to Japanese media. Just about every language that uses a Chinese-derived script uses han in the name for it, and kan is simply the Japanese repronunciation (kanji using the same exact characters as Traditional Chinese hanzi.) From there it's a matter of how you translate it since from what I can tell han (and kan in Japanese) is quite loose in definition and often just refers to whichever nation is using it, and the people within. The biggest divergence from that I could find was Wikipedia translating Hangul to 'great script' before immediately following it up with the statement that han is also used to refer to Korea.
So really the argument to make here is more whether the already-existing country-neutral convention of han + character means literally Chinese + character or people + character^{which is gonna seem weird as heck when we using that term aren't using that form of script, and is probably why we always end up with it translated as Chinese characters, as from an outside perspective it makes sense to base things at the origin point.}

gattonero2001 said:
Right now, actual China-only characters are tagged kanji, which is simply inaccurate, while it is not inaccurate to say that all kanji are Chinese characters regardless of usage.

Might have to just deal with it and treat these as the mistaggings they are. The only unique problem here seems to be that a layman can have trouble telling Japanese Kanji apart from Chinese Hanzi. But is that not merely a text equivalent of people using the wrong big cat with spots tags all the time and manually adding canid/canine to hyaenid posts?
I'm just gonna call it we wouldn't be having so much friction to the Chinese character suggestion if China wasn't still a nation right now.

magnuseffect said:
Kanji only looks country-neutral because we Westerners have so much exposure to Japanese media. Just about every language that uses a Chinese-derived script uses han in the name for it, and kan is simply the Japanese repronunciation (kanji using the same exact characters as Traditional Chinese hanzi.) From there it's a matter of how you translate it since from what I can tell han (and kan in Japanese) is quite loose in definition and often just refers to whichever nation is using it, and the people within. The biggest divergence from that I could find was Wikipedia translating Hangul to 'great script' before immediately following it up with the statement that han is also used to refer to Korea.
So really the argument to make here is more whether the already-existing country-neutral convention of han + character means literally Chinese + character or people + character...

Then perhaps we should call it "Oriental text/characters/ideograms" * or "Eastern Asian text/characters/ideograms".

___________

• That region in general has often been called the Orient. This is because maps used to have east at the top instead of north, thus when you turned yourself to match the map, you oriented yourself.

clawstripe said:

• That region in general has often been called the Orient. This is because maps used to have east at the top instead of north, thus when you turned yourself to match the map, you oriented yourself.

While true, it will get you a side-eye if you use it.

clawstripe said:
Then perhaps we should call it "Oriental text/characters/ideograms" * or "Eastern Asian text/characters/ideograms".

___________

• That region in general has often been called the Orient. This is because maps used to have east at the top instead of north, thus when you turned yourself to match the map, you oriented yourself.

nobody except old people use "oriental" anymore

strikerman said:
nobody except old people use "oriental" anymore

Hence, the alternate "Eastern Asian text/characters/ideograms" possibility.

Like I said, the Unicode standard already uses "CJK" as a blanket term.

My suggestion is to alias kanji to logogram. (Wikipedia article)

You could filter it out with logogram japanese_text, logogram chinese_text, and any other language combinations.

This would make the tag more versatile and more accurate at the same time.

*_text is expected to be tagged anyways...

The only problem is that an logogram in isolation could be confusing, since it could be kanji or hieroglyphics. Maybe logogram -hieroglyphics -cuneiform is enough to filter it out? Or having eastern_asian_logogram like suggested above.

lendrimujina said:
Like I said, the Unicode standard already uses "CJK" as a blanket term.

The problem with that is "Korean" (the K in CJK) can be ambiguous. North Korea's is heavily based on Chinese kanji, but South Korea has its own visually distinct character set that isn't kanji (they aren't even ideograms, AFAIK).

omegaumbra said:
My suggestion is to alias kanji to logogram. (Wikipedia article)

"In a written language, a logogram or logograph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme."

Eh, I think that's somewhat incorrect. There are some kanji that, alone, are incomplete and need either other kanji or kana characters to complete it, and depending on what those other characters are, can change both its meaning and how it's pronounced. What constitutes "a word" is somewhat ambiguous; Chinese and Japanese don't have clear separation of words like we do in English and other latin-based languages.

There is also the issue that some characters themselves can be ambiguous, as with my previous example of "ニ". It's both a phonograph for "ni" (pronounced like "knee", with no particular meaning), and an ideograph with the concept of "two".

I honestly don't see the point in trying to come up with a new wordier tag here, introducing ambiguity and vagueness, when people have a fairly good grasp of what "kanji" is.

https://www.lingualift.com/blog/kanji-made-in-japan/
Found this on "Kokuji", Japanese-original kanji.

Most people wouldn't know those characters aren't Chinese at sight, or know the difference between simple and traditional Chinese. Whether it's Chinese or not depends on the full sentence (all hanzi vs. Japanese's mixed case)

I think we should use kanji for individual/ambiguous cases like this where you can't tell
post #395154
And I'd even argue prioritizing the term kanji over "hanzi" (already aliased to Chinese text)/"hanja"/"Chinese character" because the vast majority of art we feature with it is Japanese (71k Japanese text vs 2300+ Chinese text)

watsit said:
The problem with that is "Korean" (the K in CJK) can be ambiguous. North Korea's is heavily based on Chinese kanji, but South Korea has its own visually distinct character set that isn't kanji (they aren't even ideograms, AFAIK).

Odd, Googling is telling me the opposite (i.e. that the North had completely abandoned hanja while the South still occasionally uses it alongside the Hangul alphabet for formal/disambiguational/stylistic reasons).

Perhaps both or all? hanzi/kanji? hanzi-kanji? 'hanzi-hanja-kanji?

lendrimujina said:
Odd, Googling is telling me the opposite (i.e. that the North had completely abandoned hanja while the South still occasionally uses it alongside the Hangul alphabet for formal/disambiguational/stylistic reasons).

I might be wrong about North, but as far as I can tell about South, it primarily uses hangul as a replacement for kanji these days (unlike Japanese where kanji is supplemented by kana). To laymen like us, Korean text is identified by hangul characters, which are a significant stylistic departure from kanji/hanzi characters, and I don't think should be lumped together under some kind of "cjk_character" tag given that visual distinctiveness.

watsit said:
"In a written language, a logogram or logograph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme."

Eh, I think that's somewhat incorrect. There are some kanji that, alone, are incomplete and need either other kanji or kana characters to complete it, and depending on what those other characters are, can change both its meaning and how it's pronounced. What constitutes "a word" is somewhat ambiguous; Chinese and Japanese don't have clear separation of words like we do in English and other latin-based languages.

That's effectively what a morpheme is.

The tag alias kanji -> chinese_character (forum #340143) has been rejected by @Rainbow_Dash.

watsit said:
I might be wrong about North, but as far as I can tell about South, it primarily uses hangul as a replacement for kanji these days (unlike Japanese where kanji is supplemented by kana). To laymen like us, Korean text is identified by hangul characters, which are a significant stylistic departure from kanji/hanzi characters, and I don't think should be lumped together under some kind of "cjk_character" tag given that visual distinctiveness.

lendrimujina said:
occasionally uses it alongside the Hangul alphabet for formal/disambiguational/stylistic reasons

The Unicode Consortium does have its problems, but it isn't pulling the K out of its ass. Hanja isn't anywhere remotely as common as kanji, but it's not nonexistent or even obscure.

Maybe sinogram?

nekozuki said:
Maybe sinogram?

That literally means the same thing and carries all the same issues.

lendrimujina said:
The Unicode Consortium does have its problems, but it isn't pulling the K out of its ass. Hanja isn't anywhere remotely as common as kanji, but it's not nonexistent or even obscure.

I'm talking about hangul characters being included under "cjk_character" (along with kana), causing it to become a broader and less useful tag and not just for kanji/hanzi as the kanji tag currently is.

watsit said:
I'm talking about hangul characters being included under "cjk_character" (along with kana), causing it to become a broader and less useful tag and not just for kanji/hanzi as the kanji tag currently is.

You're coming at it wrong, the naming isn't for the proximity of the specific characters to the written Chinese language, but to this system of logographic writing itself, which is why hangul characters, Japan-only kanji, and katakana are all grouped this way despite not being in Chinese-language writing.
I'd suggest having this hypothetical cjk_character or equivalent tag function on a level similar to cyrillic_text and back it up with chinese_text, japanese_text, and korean_text but I suspect then the friction would shift to the fact that the individual scripts themselves are distinct from one another^{differing from Cyrillic being several languages running on a shared alphabet} and the problem this thread was made for in the first place where Chinese text was being tagged with the term for Japanese text.

magnuseffect said:
You're coming at it wrong, the naming isn't for the proximity of the specific characters to the written Chinese language, but to this system of logographic writing itself, which is why hangul characters, Japan-only kanji, and katakana are all grouped this way despite not being in Chinese-language writing.
I'd suggest having this hypothetical cjk_character or equivalent tag function on a level similar to cyrillic_text and back it up with chinese_text, japanese_text, and korean_text but I suspect then the friction would shift to the fact that the individual scripts themselves are distinct from one another^{differing from Cyrillic being several languages running on a shared alphabet} and the problem this thread was made for in the first place where Chinese text was being tagged with the term for Japanese text.

But the thing at issue is images like
post #3352883
where it's just a kanji character. There's not enough context to say it's chinese_text or japanese_text. Having a "cjk_text" tag as an umbrella for all CJK character sets would mean such an image could only be tagged with cjk_text since it's not clear whether chinese_text or japanese_text applies. But then people searching cjk_text to find kanji characters like that which couldn't otherwise be tagged as Chinese or Japanese, would also get hangul and kana characters mixed in with their results.

watsit said:
But the thing at issue is images like
post #3352883
where it's just a kanji character. There's not enough context to say it's chinese_text or japanese_text. Having a "cjk_text" tag as an umbrella for all CJK character sets would mean such an image could only be tagged with cjk_text since it's not clear whether chinese_text or japanese_text applies. But then people searching cjk_text to find kanji characters like that which couldn't otherwise be tagged as Chinese or Japanese, would also get hangul and kana characters mixed in with their results.

The Unicode block in question doesn't include Kana and Hangul. Those are in their own blocks.

I'm suggesting cjk_ideogram, not cjk_text.

That's not to say we should have tags for every Unicode block, of course :p But it's a pre-existing term to blanket-categorize the shared characters without the context of the language being used.

watsit said:
But the thing at issue is images like
post #3352883
where it's just a kanji character. There's not enough context to say it's chinese_text or japanese_text.

There could also be two tags. One for any use of this group of writing systems, and some isolated_* or ambiguous_* tag to cover when the language is of uncertain origin.

the characters are called hanzi when used in chinese and kanji when used in japanese. there are, in fact, variants between languages, like 绝 in chinese and 絶 in japanese. even though the radical on the left of each character is written differently, it is still the same radical, the same character, the same meaning.

as for distinguishing whether or not a character is chinese or japanese text, that largely depends on context. in the case of the image watsit provided, the character in the image is dressed up as a japanese oni 鬼, whereas the chinese guǐ 鬼 refers to a wider scope of ghosts and monsters. plus, the description is in japanese, but that's not really the issue here.

It's already been rejected and all, but I'd like to point out that the term Kanji is still exclusive to Japanese. Moreso, Not all Kanji have Chinese origin. Take for example 込. While it is considered a Kanji because of the way it works in the language, its origin is strictly Japanese. Chinese has no such character. Is it unnecessarily complicated? Yes, but so is your suggestion. Kanjis are, linguistically speaking, a Japanese thing.