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Asian Locale Concepts

hanzi - Chinese ideographic characters.

kanzi - Japanese ideographic characters.

kanji - (colloquial) Japanese ideographic characters.

hanja - Korean ideographic characters.

KangXi - the dictionary on which the Unified Repertoire and Ordering, Version 1.0 was based.

stroke - a mark, several of which comprise a character.

component - the level of glyph organization immediately above that of stroke. Each Han glyph can be analyzed into immediate components, which can be divided into sub-components, etc., until a final division which yields the individual strokes themselves.

The JIS level 2, for example, are meant to satisfy the needs of some popular kanji names (family names, place names) and also some characters that are used often and still missing from JIS Level-1.

There are now Kanji dictionaries with JIS code information for each Kanji. The dictionaries provide all other functions people have become accustomed to: index based on stroke counts, index based on radicals, index based on on-yomi, and kun-yomi.

On-yomi and kun-yomi - Christopher Creutzig (ccr@mupad.de) writes: "... I'm pretty certain the meaning of these two words is the following: When the Japanese imported Chinese characters, they imported them in two different ways at once: One, the character was imported only by its meaning, but retained the Japanese pronounciation. This is On-yomi. At the same time, the same characters were imported with their Chinese pronounciation; this reading is called Kun-yomi and is often used when the character is combined with another character to form a word, such as the sign for 'fire' used in the word for 'smoke'."


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