納 with a 入

[skylee]

I would like to type 納 with 入 instead of 人 on the right side. I find the 人 unacceptable. What should I do? I use Google Cantonese / Pinyin input on my phone.

[CathaySpecific]

What a wonderful discovery!  Of all the characters using 內 (nei4) as phonetic, only 吶 appears to consistently and faithfully retain the form you're looking for.

 

I suggest that you (and the rest of us) start exclusively using 吶 in place of 納,訥,鈉,肭 as an act of civil disobedience.

 

Little known fact, the character 吶 was  invented solely for the purpose of translating the song "Nananana Nananana, Hey Hey Hey ..."

[Hofmann]

Root and replace the typeface you're seeing with a typeface you like. This should be called something like DroidSansFallback.ttf or NotoSansHant-Regular.otf on Android. Don't know about iOS.

[TechKatz]

Why do you find it unaccatable? Seems it's close to the "traditional" way of writing it:

http://sf.zdic.net/sf/ks/0407/12f016129c527098ecf68f6552b9f0d0.html

http://coe21.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/djvuchar?query=%E7%B4%8D

[CathaySpecific]

TechKatz, don't want to speak for others but I think I know where skylee is coming from - 內 (nei4) is one of those rare gems, a pictograph that hits the mark:  入 "enter" from 冂 "outside" = "inside, within".  The math works.  It feels right.  So why should the phonetic compounds that use 內 get bastardized and replace the logical symbol for "enter" with "person"  納,訥,鈉,肭,氝 .  It seems disrespectful of tradition - or maybe it reflects an arrogant, anthropocentric view of the world ... did some haughty scholar decide at some point that people have a right above other living things on "entering" from the outside?  Ok I may be reading into this a bit too much 

 

 

TechKatz, to your point, this is not a recent development, it can't be blamed on computer fonts or 20th century simplification.  As your examples show, this substitution has been made in Chinese script for ... a long long time, even within 內 itself.

 

What I personally find equally objectionable is the lack of consistency among font sets - as my attachment above shows.

[陳德聰]

I think it's really just about convention. It's clear that a multitude of people have written it a certain way and there are other people who write it a different way. There's no need to bring in some sort of semantic break down, especially one that doesn't really hold up considering the way form and sound can be more important to the way characters develop than the actual components and their literal meaning.

[Hofmann]

It's Unicode, which uses PRC standard characters. If what CathaySpecific said is true, 吶 was probably added very late and wasn't subjected to the unification.

[CathaySpecific]

my comment that 吶 was invented for a 1960's song was a joke :-)  the rest of my comments and my general agreement with skylee is genuine & lacking any sarcasm.  you're probably right though, 吶 must be a late entry hence got spared the unification chopping block.

[davoosh]

I believe Hoffman has told me in another thread that the correct form (in calligraphy, and therefore arguably in general) is 内 with 人, not 入. The 捺 stroke of the 入 component is unacceptable in this character,  as the right-most part is already 冂. Is there a reason why HK adopted the form with 入？

[TechKatz]

内 has nothing to do with 人.

内 is also not necessarily a composition of 冂 and 入. Apparently it was just a pictograph of an open tent.

入 was symmetric, looked more like 人 today. It was altered in the Lishu and Kaishu script to make the two characters distinguishable. But it wasn't necessary to alter 内 or 納 so the symmetric shape remained.

[davoosh]

I was referring more to the stroke placement in kaishu styles (in which a 入 in this character seems to 'break' the rules), but the etymology is interesting nonetheless.

[dwq]

The pages TechKatz linked for 入 and 內 have these explanations, if you trust the site.

Primitive pictograph 入. An open tent door. Meaning enter.

Primitive pictograph 内內. An open tent flap door. Meaning inside.

So it makes sense, in a way, that 入 is the door of 內 ...

[CathaySpecific]

肏 is making a lot more sense now.  2 people on top of each other in a tent.      or wait - is that "entering meat"?  come on Chinese people that is one dirty mental pictograph ...

[imron]

this is not a recent development, it can't be blamed on computer fonts or 20th century simplification

The problem Skylee is having is totally a computer font and 20th century 'unification' problem (note unification not simplification).

 

The unification in question was the Han Unification that happened with Unicode.  Just like the letter g is sometimes written 'g' and sometimes written 'g', but we see it as the same letter just two different fonts, the creators of Unicode decided that 内 and 內 are the same character, with differences in display to be determined by the font, rather than being treated as two different characters.

 

The unification was done for tens of thousands of characters across Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK), which is why if you want characters to look 'Japanese' you need a Japanese font, and if you want Chinese looking characters you use a Chinese looking font - or maybe even a Traditional-Character font vs a Simplified-Character font, but underneath they are still the same 'characters'.

 

There is quite a bit of debate and disagreement whether or not this was the correct thing to do, but it was done and it is how all modern computers (including mobile phones) display text, and so to Skylee, if you wish to change how the characters look, then the answer is to change the font settings on your phone.

[dwq]

People can choose their preferred font so that the correct variant shows up on their screen locally. Unfortunately, if they send the text to other people, that information is lost and the receiver might not see what the sender sees (unless some kind of rich format that includes font information is used), and writing text that require more than 1 variant is clumsy at least, requiring switching fonts in the middle of a sentence, for example.

Some members of the Unicode consortium does recognize the need to display different glyphs for the same characters, and they came up with UTS #37: UNICODE IDEOGRAPHIC VARIATION DATABASE. It is not really de-Unification, most (if not all) of the contributions seems to be Japanese who has strong preference for how the name of their towns and people should be written.

I think the same technique can be used for Chinese, unfortunately no one had spent the time to catalog all the Chinese variants and submit them to Unicode.

The database itself is at <http://unicode.org/ivd/>. For example, if you look inside the Adobe-Japan1 collection PDF under 7D0D you can see 納, which Japanese people also use, in both forms.

Windows 8 / Mac OS X Lion or later is said to have native support for glyph variants for Japanese.

I don't think Android or IOS has such support currently.