Z-variant
In Unicode, two glyphs are said to be Z-variants (often spelled zVariants) if they share the same etymology but have slightly different appearances and different Unicode code points. For example, the Unicode characters U+8AAA
Differences on the Z-axis[edit]
The Unicode philosophy of code point allocation for CJK languages is organized along three "axes." The X-axis represents differences in semantics; for example, the Latin capital A (U+0041 A) and the Greek capital alpha (U+0391
The Z-axis represents minor typographical differences. For example, the Chinese characters (U+838A
Thus, were Han unification perfectly successful, Z-variants would not exist. They exist in Unicode because it was deemed useful to be able to "round-trip" documents between Unicode and other CJK encodings such as Big5 and CCCII. For example, the character
Confusion[edit]
There is some confusion over the exact definition of "Z-variant." For example, in an Internet Draft (of RFC 3743) dated 2002,[2] one finds bù "no" (U+4E0D
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ a b "Glossary". www.unicode.org.
- ^ Huang, K.; Ko, Y.; Konishi, K.; Qian, H. (April 2004). "Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean". tools.ietf.org.
- ^ "Unihan Database Lookup". www.unicode.org.