A Spectre is Haunting Unicode
www.dampfkraft.com
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).
  • Ernest@lemmy.zipEnglish
    10·
    17 hours ago

    The article is actually written informatively, but for anyone else who may have assumed from the title that this is some failing of Unicode–it is not, the goal of Unicode is to encode all human writing. This includes “nonsense” glyphs that have been widely used or interchanged between computer systems, including the (in)famous “RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW” (⍼).

  • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
    17·
    23 hours ago

    This article is underwhelming. Despite being in English, it links to a Japanese Wikipedia article. The English Wikipedia article has all the same info as this post and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_characters

    tl;dr: some Japanese kanji from older encodings were carried forward into new ones. But some of those characters were difficult or impossible to identify. Most were archaic place names or transcription errors.

  • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    21 hours ago

    I asked AI to tranlate it and it correctly identified the characters are ghost characters.

    I asked Google Translate which said it was simplified Chinese “The company is committed to providing high-quality products and services.”

    lol

    • brsrklf@jlai.luEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      It really does. Weird.

      Removing one character got me this though :

      This appears to be a string of garbled characters (mojibake) resulting from incorrect text encoding. It does not convey a meaningful message in Chinese.

      And removing even more got me to “The ancient city of Loulan”.