Comment by charcircuit
1 day ago
>having different code points so that things like text search sometimes don't work.
Cross language search seems like a hack to me. Searching in Chinese should find Chinese words and searching in Japanese should find Japanese words. Being able to search in Japanese and get Chinese results is not what most users want, unless they don't have a proper keyboard.
Do you feel similarly about french and english? It could work but would be a little weird and annoyong to switch language modes
I think you underestimate the similarities. For instance Japanese names are not translated to Chinese. Theyre just read with Chinese pronunciations. So Chinese will regularly interact with Japanese content (im guess it happens the other way around too, but i dont have the personal experience)
>Do you feel similarly about french and english?
Yes. If you search gâteau it shouldn't show results for cake by default.
>Japanese names are not translated to Chinese
Then it makes sense to search for the names in Japanese. Either they are translated to Chinese so you should be able to search with Chinese, or they aren't and you should search with Japanese.
> Either they are translated to Chinese so you should be able to search with Chinese, or they aren't and you should search with Japanese.
The point is that when they look identical most of the time, you have no idea which language "mode" the text is in.
Tokyo is 東京 in both languages. They're not visually distinguishable. Maybe in a long list some particular characters are written slightly differently, but you'd have to really inspect the list and hope that distinguishing characters show up.
From the outside this may look weird, but to people that are around Chinese characters having multiple ways to write a character is just a normal fact of life. They look different in classical writing, seal scripts and cursive scripts. Trades people will also use shorthands. You have analogous situations with Simplified and Traditional Character - where some characters are simplified to fewer strokes and others are not. But as a reader you don't really care if it's 吃/喫 or 臺灣/台灣/台湾. There is basically no situation where you want to find 吃 but not 喫.
I get the desire to preserve native Japanese forms of the Chinese characters. But that seems like something mostly resolved with a font
If you want to mix Chinese and Japanese characters, then you are left having to mix fonts - which is a bit ugly I guess. It's not the most ergonomic solution, but this is the edge case. Most of the time you want different forms to search the same. If you search 臺灣 and your word processor skipped 台灣, then you'd be rightfully annoyed.