Chinese Villagers Forced to Change Name

[Glenn]

Reuters: Chinese villagers forced to change untypable name

I was curious to see if anyone had heard of this, and if anyone knew what the character for the name is. I'm really curious to know what it is. That's all, really...

[mikelove]

There's a picture in another copy of the article someone sent me; it looks like a 彡 directly above a 且. Might be in Unicode Extension B but I don't think it's in any of the earlier encodings.

[roddy]

Here you go: 上边一个“彡”，下边一个“且”，这个念shǎn的字...

Took a few searches to find, but a Google news search for 山东 改姓 turned it up.

Is there any rational behind the choice of 冼 instead?(I think that's what it was). Is it just the closest sounding surname?

[mikelove]

Found it in Unicode Extension B: code point 22489. Though of course hardly any computers can render that... There's a picture of it on the relevant Unihan page.

[Glenn]

改姓！ I was close to having the right search terms, but I couldn't quite put it together. I tried a search on baidu, but there was a lot that didn't look like what I was looking for, and I wasn't patient enough to try to get through it all with my limited Chinese ability. Do you know if there's a traditional variant? I'm trying to figure out if I can get it anywhere (I'm guessing that's all there is to it, since it's so rare). Thanks for that!

[gato]

It is in the Unihan database:

http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=22489&useutf8=false

You can see another picture of the character here:

http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kz=868474154

山东菏泽200村民因生僻字被迫改姓 当改不当改?

[Glenn]

Thanks for that, gato. I find this pretty interesting. How much trouble would it be to make more computers able to input/output this character, I wonder? I know nothing about encodings and the work that goes into them, and I realize that's probably way too broad a question, but I still wonder.

[Hofmann]

Let's see if it truncates my post.

Yup. But that still doesn't count as untypeable. They're just as untypeable as HKSCS characters.

[Glenn]

You mean you can type that 彡? Is it similar to how you got 卍 the other way?

..........................................且

[flow]

ironically if you look up the character in the KangXi (http://zdic.net/zd/zi3/ZdicF0ZdicA2Zdic92Zdic89.htm), it would appear appear the surname got changed before, "by imperial stroke of the brush": 以御筆改爲陝.

[gato]

The emperor had a lot of foresight.