The proper name for "Japanese text" is "kanji" (okay, techinally it's not that simple). Make more sense to call it by it's proper name. Plus "kanji" takes fewer keystrokes, FWIW.

Japanese text can be hiragana or katakana as well.

I say we keep it as japanese_text, in case some don't know it's called kanji or those others. Similar to how we use russian_text and not cyrilic

Rainbow_Dash said:
I say we keep it as japanese_text, in case some don't know it's called kanji or those others. Similar to how we use russian_text and not cyrilic

Fair enough. Flip my suggestion then?

TheTundraTerror said:
Fair enough. Flip my suggestion then?

hmm, I think I just might

Rainbow_Dash said:
hmm, I think I just might

Not all kanji is Japanese.

So then just keep it as is? Oh but I think I will alias Cyrillic to russian_text, even though yeah I know it's not the only country to use it, still just for the sake of condensing so I can find these things with one tag

I vote keep kanji/japanese as they are. Neither really implies the other. Some kanji is shared between Japanese and Chinese, so without the context of a sentence it can be difficult to determine the language.

I might suggest aliasing or at least implying hiragana or katakana to japanese_text, if those don't already exist. But I would go no further.

ippiki_ookami said:
Not all kanji is Japanese.

From Wikipedia:
Kanji (漢字; Japanese pronunciation: [kandʑi] listen) are the adopted logographic Chinese characters (hanzi)[1] that are used in the modern Japanese writing system...

This is just me stating my stance. What the mods decide on is up to them. Just want a little fraking neatness.

Standardize language_text as opposed to the specific subset of characters. Nobody uses kanji any more anyway, they're phasing it out.

I do not see why this would need to be so specific. Its not like we are tagging English as "American_English_Text" and "British_English_text" its all just English. So why not leave what we know as Japanese text as "Japanese_text" regardless the type?

私の遺産の話をすることは非常に攻撃的である。

TheTundraTerror said:
From Wikipedia:
Kanji (漢字; Japanese pronunciation: [kandʑi] listen) are the adopted logographic Chinese characters (hanzi)[1] that are used in the modern Japanese writing system...

This is just me stating my stance. What the mods decide on is up to them. Just want a little fraking neatness.

You missed the part on kokkun, which are kanji borrowed directly from Chinese, albeit often with different meanings. You've also overlooked hiragana and katakana, which are both very much used in modern Japanese. All over the place. Aurali's sentence uses 9 unique hiragana a total of 11 times. It would be completely incorrect to alias hiragana and katakana to kanji. Please take at least a high school-level course on Japanese before asserting otherwise or mincing Wikipedia articles to support your worldview.

But as kokkun demonstrate, without a sentence to provide context, an individual kanji character can be difficult to discern from Chinese hanzi, and I could see it being a common mistake. Maybe I should change my stance to "please alias kanji to invalid_tag, and ditto hanzi".

Thinking on it further, I am dubious of the value to the kanji tag to begin with. If there's enough context to make a language determination, I would argue that it's more appropriate to use japanese_text or chinese_text.

We only have two posts that use the hiragana tag, and none that use katakana. Both of these occur routinely in examples of japanese_text. Why start tagging kanji?

Edit: Not trying to be mean, but being correct about this matters to me, and I cannot emphasize enough that it's incorrect to imply or alias all Japanese text to kanji.

How about the other way around, as in kanji-> japanese text? Or maybe an implication? (Also no idea on Asian languages at all)

As previously mentioned, if we're doing anything with those tags, it should be for a very good reason, since there doesn't seem to be a problem with the way they're used now

Why? Because:

• Aliasing japanese_text -> kanji removes the possibility of including hiragana & katakana- an essential part of japanese_text

• Aliasing kanji -> japanese_text could generate a lot of confusion if/when people start tagging chinese text with kanji

If anything, an implication of

katakana -> japanese_text
hiragana -> japanese_text

sounds fine to me, since they're exclusive to the Japanese writing systems

ikdind said:
Words.

Well, IMHO, tagging kanji without tagging hiragana and katakana would be like tagging "consonants" and "vowels".

I think the idea of adding implications would be the best route.

When you start mixing kanji and hira/kata, I start stabbing.

GreyMaria said:
When you start mixing kanji and hira/kata, I start stabbing.

My knowledge of Japanese language begins and ends with 'hentai'. I just want clean tag lists.

TheTundraTerror said:
IMHO, tagging kanji without tagging hiragana and katakana would be like tagging "consonants" and "vowels".

By way of counter-example: post #192373

That contains two characters which are either kokkun kanji or hanzi. They can't be trivially determined because they happen to mean "fox" and "good fortune" in both Chinese and Japanese. The main character of the work happens to be an anthropomorphic fox. With sufficient investigation in the artist's other works and their titling, one might eventually conclude that the artist intended the characters as kanji instead of hanzi, but that's not remotely in keeping with TWYSNWYK. Hence the dubious value of a kanji tag to begin with.

Kanji is not like consonants or vowels. Kanji are, for the most part, words (or words within compound words, such as "butterfly" being a combination of "butter" and "fly", even though they don't look, smell, or taste at all like butter).

To fix your simile, tagging "kanji" without tagging "hiragana" and "katakana" would be like tagging "words" separately from "consonants" and "vowels".

I could get behind

katakana -> japanese_text
hiragana -> japanese_text

as either implications or aliases.

Edit: I originally said there was one ideogram, and later realized the picture had two, the smaller second one being much harder to read than the larger. The larger one is fox/kitsune/hú, the smaller one is good fortune/fuku/fú. Still completely identical writings and readings between Japanese and Chinese.

Rainbow_Dash said:
So then just keep it as is? Oh but I think I will alias Cyrillic to russian_text, even though yeah I know it's not the only country to use it, still just for the sake of condensing so I can find these things with one tag

Wouldn't it be better to alias all those languages to Cyrillic_text instead of Cyrillic text to Russian text?

Or just not have a Cyrillic text tag at all. That would probably be better.

720p said:
Wouldn't it be better to alias all those languages to Cyrillic_text instead of Cyrillic text to Russian text?

Or just not have a Cyrillic text tag at all. That would probably be better.

Well yeah that's what I meant; that it can just stay as russian_text

As a Japanese translator, I see no purpose to a kanji tag at all. Searching it won't help you find anything, since you could more specifically look for japanese_text or chinese_text, or both. It's as unnecessary as tags for vowels, consonants, numerals, diacritics, punctuation, grammatical structures, etc. And for the same reasons as listed above, implications are also unnecessary.

Language tags are forgotten often enough, expecting people to tag kanji on top of that is silly.