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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   2512 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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Transnational culture war: For at least a decade, Chinese-speaking people who identify as "nonbinary" or "agender" have been using "X也" and "TA" as makeshift gender-neutral pronouns, replacing the original default "他" ("人" = "human", nowadays interpreted as "male" in this context) and the female-specific "她" ("女" = "female") that was invented only a hundred years ago as a result of contact with the West. Now (actually, back in September), activists have successfully gotten Unicode to codify a new hanzi for this purpose—a combined version of "㐅也". (At the time of writing, the actual character won't show up on your screen properly since it hasn't yet been added to the fonts on your computer, but it is "𲎿".) The parallel to Western neopronouns like "ze" is obvious.

Characters that combine Han components with Latin, kana, or other scripts challenge the fundamental definition of what counts as a “Hanzi”. China has repeatedly emphasized this point: while such hybrids may function as ideographs in practice, they exceed the established understanding and technical definition of Han characters. Including them indiscriminately in the CJK Unified Ideographs (CJKUI) would blur the line between alphabetic scripts and Han, undermining both sinological theory and practical assumptions in computing.

The discussion of script-hybrid characters highlights both the practical needs of users and the importance of maintaining a clear scope for CJK Unified Ideographs. These characters do exist, but their inclusion within CJKUI raises unresolved questions of definition, procedure, and implementation.

  • Creating a separate block is the most balanced and forward-looking solution. It allows these forms to be encoded without altering the Han-only scope of CJKUI and gives space for tailored procedures to be developed.

  • Leaving hybrid code points unmapped in GB 18030 [the PRC's separate copy of Unicode] could serve as a pragmatic fallback if hybrids are nevertheless placed in CJK extensions. This would keep China’s implementation consistent.

Two new entries in Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names incoming:

  • People's names are written in any single script.

  • Okay, fine, a person's name may contain characters from multiple scripts, but surely no single character in any person's name contains multiple scripts within itself.

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

Unsung feature of making these mistakes: you don't have to deal with users like these.

EDIT: This is a joke, right?

This is a joke, right?

It's maybe half a joke. It's far from impossible that the next version of Unicode will add the "⼴K" character, and then somebody in the PRC or in Japan will try to register that as the name of his child.

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