The bulk update request #4862 is active.

Reason: See topic #34603

TL;DR: Calling them "kanji" is ethnocentric, the name should be neutral.

Also "ideograph" sounds ugly and we don't want to make this more complicated than it needs to be.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia said:
Other scripts used for these languages, such as bopomofo and the Latin-based pinyin for Chinese, hiragana and katakana for Japanese, and hangul for Korean, are not strictly "CJK characters", (...)

We already have specific e621 definitions of various terms, if people start tagging kana and hangul as "CJK character" (extremely unlikely IMO) then please just point them to the wiki.

EDIT: The bulk update request #4862 (forum #366355) has been approved by @gattonero2001.

isnt the K in cjk for korean...? aka hangul?

cutefox123 said:
isnt the K in cjk for korean...? aka hangul?

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia said:
Hangul was created in 1443 CE by King Sejong the Great in an attempt to increase literacy by serving as a complement (or alternative) to the logographic Sino-Korean Hanja, (...)

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia said:
Hanja (Hangul: 한자; Hanja: 漢字) are Chinese characters (Chinese: 漢字; pinyin: hànzì) used in the writing of Korean.

Calling them "kanji" is ethnocentric, the name should be neutral.

Just one comment: "漢字" ("kanji") literarily means "Chinese character". I believe that Japanese and Koreans are very aware that they owe a subset of their writting system to China, in larger or lesser extent. Somehow I don't see it as "ethnocentrism". If someone (e.g. from the West) see the characters, they will identify them as "Kanji" or "Hanzi" or "Hanja", depending if it has studied the language of one of those countries.

Being this a Furry art site, with a lot of Anime admirers, it is somehow "natural" that most will identify them as "Kanji". I am not against your idea... I just mean, that I don't see it as the result of some sort of "supremacism".

Regards.

mexicanfurry said:
Just one comment: "漢字" ("kanji") literarily means "Chinese character". I believe that Japanese and Koreans are very aware that they owe a subset of their writting system to China, in larger or lesser extent. Somehow I don't see it as "ethnocentrism". If someone (e.g. from the West) see the characters, they will identify them as "Kanji" or "Hanzi" or "Hanja", depending if it has studied the language of one of those countries.

By my understanding a part of the problem is that users are tagging kanji for all of the above, creating ambiguity across languages, as to a layman it may be hard to distinguish japanese_text from chinese_text. Regardless of how ubiquitous Japanese media is in Western online culture, kanji is a linguistically-flavoured term–being merely the Japanese pronunciation of the same characters–and from what I've seen the site prefers to lean more heavily toward English language terminology and titles where possible.
This update, perhaps unusually, aims to fix the problem by ambiguating into a broader neutral tag that can be used alongside japanese_text and chinese_text.

Edit: I'm plain wrong, see below and the wiki

magnuseffect said:
By my understanding a part of the problem is that users are tagging kanji for all of the above, creating ambiguity across languages, as to a layman it may be hard to distinguish japanese_text from chinese_text. Regardless of how ubiquitous Japanese media is in Western online culture, kanji is a linguistically-flavoured term–being merely the Japanese pronunciation of the same characters–and from what I've seen the site prefers to lean more heavily toward English language terminology and titles where possible.
This update, perhaps unusually, aims to fix the problem by ambiguating into a broader neutral tag that can be used alongside japanese_text and chinese_text.

I am myself not a very proficient reader of Japanese, and even less Chinese or Korean. The use of the simple tags like japanese_text , chinese_text etcetera... I personally find most useful. They imply (not explicitly but implicitly) the use of Kanji / Hanzi / (Hanja / Hangul).

By tagging the use of Chinese characters as "Kanji" disregarding of language, maybe be felt like improper / unjust by a native of that language. But then I believe that for most current users of this site, the "(language)_text" tags are sufficiently informative. The Admins may want to check how much traffic from Asian Countries they have, or estimate how much potential it has to grow in the future.

mexicanfurry said:
I am myself not a very proficient reader of Japanese, and even less Chinese or Korean. The use of the simple tags like japanese_text , chinese_text etcetera... I personally find most useful. They imply (not explicitly but implicitly) the use of Kanji / Hanzi / (Hanja / Hangul).

By tagging the use of Chinese characters as "Kanji" disregarding of language, maybe be felt like improper / unjust by a native of that language. But then I believe that for most current users of this site, the "(language)_text" tags are sufficiently informative. The Admins may want to check how much traffic from Asian Countries they have, or estimate how much potential it has to grow in the future.

CJK character should be used only when a CJK character appears in isolation. Most CJK characters are written identically across two or more languages, which makes it impossible to determine their nationality in this situation.

For example: post #3035944 -> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/死

mexicanfurry said:
"漢字" ("kanji") literarily means "Chinese character"

Not really, the literal meaning is "Han character".

mexicanfurry said:
The use of the simple tags like japanese_text , chinese_text etcetera... I personally find most useful. They imply (not explicitly but implicitly) the use of Kanji / Hanzi / (Hanja / Hangul).

Japanese text can be written without using Kanji at all, and Korean text rarely even use Hanja.

gattonero2001 said:
CJK character should be used only when a CJK character appears in isolation. Most CJK characters are written identically across two or more languages, which makes it impossible to determine their nationality in this situation.

I'm not sure I like this definition of that tag at all. It may just end up being mistagged all the time.

stupidmelon said:
I'm not sure I like this definition of that tag at all. It may just end up being mistagged all the time.

The wiki page for kanji uses this definition since 2015.

If this tag is intended to specifically include Chinese characters as used in Korean and Japanese, but exclude all characters that are used in those languages but not Chinese, then the name cjk_character is wrong on its face and will lead to mass mistagging. Alias to chinese_character instead.

wat8548 said:
If this tag is intended to specifically include Chinese characters as used in Korean and Japanese, but exclude all characters that are used in those languages but not Chinese, then the name cjk_character is wrong on its face and will lead to mass mistagging. Alias to chinese_character instead.

This is what I initially wanted to do, but it was vetoed in topic #34558.

gattonero2001 said:
The wiki page for kanji uses this definition since 2015.

I can understand if it is the definition for kanji from historical reasons. I just think cjk_character is not an appropriate tag name to use this definition, because typical usage of the term includes Kana and Hangul. IMO han_character may be a better choice.

wat8548 said:
If this tag is intended to specifically include Chinese characters as used in Korean and Japanese, but exclude all characters that are used in those languages but not Chinese, then the name cjk_character is wrong on its face and will lead to mass mistagging. Alias to chinese_character instead.

That would be a problem because there are some kanji that aren't of Chinese origin (the character set may have started as an import of a subset of Chinese characters, but over the generations a few Japanese-native ones have been added that aren't in the Chinese set).

The term cjk_character isn't great either though because that means any Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language character, including Hiragana, Katakana, and Hangul. IMEs will typically use the term CJK characters to indicate writing in any Chinese, Japanese, and Korean character set, so "CJK character" would logically include them. You can point people at the wiki all you want, but when e6's definition is so different to how the term is used elsewhere, you're going to be dealing with mistags regularly.

I think using the word "ideograph" (or ideogram) is inevitable if accuracy is to be held with this.

cjk_ideograph? (kana aren't ideographs, right?)

People will probably keep using kanji and let the system correct it automatically anyway

omegaumbra said:
I think using the word "ideograph" (or ideogram) is inevitable if accuracy is to be held with this.

cjk_ideograph? (kana aren't ideographs, right?)

People will probably keep using kanji and let the system correct it automatically anyway

Han characters aren't even ideographs (that's just what Unicode decides to call them, which is a misnomer), they are logograms.

stupidmelon said:
Han characters aren't even ideographs (that's just what Unicode decides to call them, which is a misnomer), they are logograms.

Oh, so cjk_logogram would be more accurate?

The bulk update request #4862 (forum #366355) has been approved by @gattonero2001.