30/07/2018 A Spectre is Haunting Unicode

A Spectre is Haunting
Unicode
2018­07­29T14:03:09+09:00

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).

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Be careful what you write. via the NDL

For a long time the ghost characters remained an unexplained

and mostly forgotten curiosity, but in 1997 an investigation was
launched to discover where they had come from. While all
characters in the JIS standard were supposed to have a record of
their sources, even when it existed it wasn't very specific, typically
just listing the document it was sourced from.

You'd think that listing the source would make tracking down the
origins of the characters easy, but it's important to clarify what
counts as a "source" - one of the more common sources for the
ghost characters was the "Overview of National Administrative
Districts" (国土行政区画総覧), a comprehensive list of place
names in Japan. You might, as I initially did, imagine this to be a
kind of atlas, an oversize book with at most a few hundred pages.
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It turns out the latest edition is a seven volume set with each
volume having roughly nine hundred pages. Imagine tracking
down a single character without a page reference.

Despite the difficulty, the investigation into the ghost characters

was successful in discovering their origins - mostly. By
interviewing the catalogers involved in the creation of the
standard, the investigators established that some characters were
inadvertently invented as mistakes in the cataloging process. 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 ( ) was not added to JIS or
Unicode until much later and doesn't display on most sites for
me.

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The core ghost characters: 妛挧暃椦槞蟐袮閠駲墸壥彁

In the end only one character had neither a clear source nor any
historical precedent: 彁. The most likely explanation is that it was
created as a misreading of the 彊 character, but no specific
indcident was uncovered.

Following the general adoption of the JIS standards these

characters all made their way into Unicode, which has its own
separate set of ghost characters introduced during CJK
unification.

To sum up - in 1978 a series of small mistakes created some

characters out of nothing. The errors went undiscovered just long

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enough to be set in stone, and now these ghosts are, at least in

potential, a part of every computer on the planet, lurking in the
dark corners of character tables.

At this rate they'll presumably be with humanity forever. Ψ

References / related links:

幽霊文字 ‑ 通信用語の基礎知識 - the most thorough online

source, with citations from the 1997 investigation.
大正十二年の幽霊文字 - ことばマガジン：朝日新聞デジタル
- an example of 彁 mistakenly used in a digitized Taisho
newspaper due to a faded printing of 彊.
Nico Nico Douga's Wiki treats each of them as the name of a
youkai.
天书 or A Book from the Sky, a hand-printed book by Xu Bing
using only made-up Chinese characters.

Dampfkraft is the home page of Paul McCann, who lives near

Tokyo Tower with a jade tree.

Ⓚ Kopyleft, All Rites Reversed. Do as you like.

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