Paul McCann:

In 1978 Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters (幽霊文字).

This is a really interesting story. Spoilers: it isn’t ghost in the machine or any supernatural thing, but seems to be simple mistakes, which is understandable when dealing with thousands of characters, many of which are complex, many of which are rarely used.

For example, 妛 was an error introduced while trying to record “山 over 女”. “山 over 女” occurs in the name of a particular place and was thus suitable for inclusion in the JIS standard, but because they couldn’t print it as one character yet, 山 and 女 were printed separately, cut out, and pasted onto a sheet of paper, and then copied. When reading the copy, the line where the two little pieces of paper met looked like a stroke and was added to the character by mistake. The original character (𡚴𡚴𡚴) was not added to JIS or Unicode until much later and doesn’t display on most sites for me.

Check out the link for the full scoop.

LINK: A Spectre is Haunting Unicode

Link Blog

Back when I had my own website, I used to post a few random links everyday or every few days, in the style of http://kottke.org or http://daringfireball.net. Readers seemed to enjoy seeing them.

To signify a link post, I’ll put an arrow (→) at the beginning of the title to show you guys it is a link post and that you can skip it if such things don’t interest you.


	David LaSpina is an American photographer lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time. More?

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