Talk:Jinmeiyō kanji/Archives/2012

List of Jinmeiyō kanji?

Is there any interest in creating a Jinmeiyō kanji list similar to the one for jōyō kanji? I am a novice Japanese student and Wikipedia user but see this as a very beneficial potential resource (not to mention personal learning opportunity), and am starting a page for the project at this User page. The current list in the article here is not particularly helpful to anyone looking for meanings or hiragana/romaji of the characters. Aetherwaltz (talk) 04:21, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

French help

Hello all -- pardon my French, literally, I'm just using autotranlation from the French wikipedia article on this and then cleaning up the language. Any help is appreciated. --Arcadian 16:07, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm going to add the {attention} tag to this page so that hopefully someone who knows a little something about Jinmeiyo Kanji or French will help clean up the untranslated portions.

I don't know much about this, but according to this article, as of September 2004 or so there are 773 Jinmeiyo Kanji. I'll try to find to time to do some research and finish Jmabel's clean up, but it could take a while. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will take this on first. -Adjusting 07:14, 2005 Apr 15 (UTC)

• Looks like this has been done. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:27, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

Translation from French

The following is moved from Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English:

This page is about a Japanese character set, kanji, however the page was translated from the French version of this page. Some of the French is still in the page. My guess is that either a French or Japanese speaker could finish this page.

• I nailed most of the French (though there was one set of tricky prepositions and one just plain ambiguity that may need to be resolved by someone who actually knows the topic). I improved on the machine translations of the French translations of Japanese (!) but may not yet have all of them correct. Those should be quick work for someone with Japanese and English. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:42, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)

• The key to this page might be that 90% of the words are very ordinary Putonghua words. See Taipei's Far East Book Company English-Chinese dictionaries to check. A native Chinese or Japanese who is adroit at those two countries cross relations could probably provide a salient explanation of the role of these words in Japan. My guess is that most people with these names are children of parents who are educated and very simpatico with China. As far as individual words such as 'excrement' and 'cancer' are concerned as used in names I believe that these items can be tweaked by parents with a positive attitude to create positive energy and popularity for the child involved. What I'm saying is that Jinmeiyo is a good thing, not a bad thing, but it requires a little imagination to use these words properly. There is no shortage of such names in the Western list of first and last names. (Richard Agar, William Shatner, and Jello Biafra are examples of slightly strange names with very solid parsed value.) Therefore, one should assume that for the most part, Jinmeiyo names are expressly taught to expand the Japanese body's student mind. Ordinary names like Tanaka, Honda and Kawata are made of very very simple pairs of words. These would correspond to names like Stubbs, Jones and Davis; or to first names like Bob, Sue and Bill. The Jinmeiyo names are so complicated and interesting, and it is difficult to think of examples that Westerners would remember. These Jinmeiyo names would correspond to more complicated Western names like Asimov, Bradbury, P. Diddy, Ridenhour and Rokhabit. Such first names could include Siobhan, Donatella or Clay. In other words, these are very wiki names insofar as they are information-positive and -participative. Indeed, when one looks at the Chinese word for Wiki one might see this very idea (wei ji could be easily translated as 'unexploited genetics', to take a little poetic license). To extrapolate, this Jinmeiyo method is used unknowingly by westerners to create words like Tangerine Dream, Phish, Bad Religion and Flavor Flav. To further extrapolate, this method is used to create beautiful, unusual words like Chicago, Des Moines, Vancouver and San Luis Obispo. If you think about it, most place names are like this. As the gist of the list of the kanji involved is virtually 100% regular Chinese that didn't make it to Japan ca 400 ad, when Japan became 'kanjified', or are simply words that have historical sensitivity to Japanese people while remaining firmily within the lexicon of the educated people there, this geopolitical usage is key to figuring out why this page is important. Nuff said. It might take an expert to tweak this properly.
• McDogm Apr 28 2005 1210 est usa

<end moved content>

Meaning of "jinmeiyo"

It occurs to me that Jin means Gold in Japanese, as a direct adaptation of the Hanzi Pinyin 'Gold'. And, 'Mei' generally means beautiful in Asianspeak. Cf Mei Guo, Mi Guk. Gold is a very positive word. This gives more support to the idea that Jinmeiyo kanji are very good kanji to use, the name Jinmeiyo giving a lot of support to the words presented in the list, especially the ones that seem questionable and difficult viz the article.McDogm--McDogm 07:48, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

No. 人名用漢字 means 'Kanji designated for personal names'. --Jondel 08:33, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

Gold is 'gin' with a hard g sound as in gold(金).　Beautiful is mi (美).--Jondel 09:21, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

Technically, gold is kin. It's just that the /k/ is frequently voiced in compounds due to rendaku. — Gwalla | Talk 21:38, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Kanji were borrowed in the 5th through 9th centuries, and their on-yomi come from various Chinese dialects. Furthermore, both Chinese and Japanese have undergone some sound change since then. So any attempt to assign connections based on similarities between modern pronunciation in Japanese and in a single dialect of Chinese is problematic. — Gwalla | Talk 21:38, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Just for absolute clarity: 人 (person) 名 (name) 用 (use) 漢字 (Chinese character). Exploding Boy 23:09, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

Additional Kanji

When I was experimenting with Chinese characters by converting them into Japanese in Excite.JP (as random kana and kanji), I came across 3 new Jinmeiyo:

瞬 (Madoka) 眠 (Nemuri) 勇 (Isamu)

I'll see if I can get more later on.

MORE KANJI: 祥 (Sachi), 逸 (Itsu), 晴 (Hare), 晶川 (Shōsen)

--Datavi X 18:47, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

778 or 774?

How come is it that the section claiming to give the "Complete list of the 778 jinmeiyō kanji" actually gives 774? Also, how come is it nobody bothered to count? --Gro-Tsen 14:20, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I have added a note about this below.JimBreen (talk) 10:19, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

-> Why do you mention 77x when the original paragraph says, "983"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.67.91.149 (talk) 05:57, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Ambiguous preposition

In two places in the article, it mentions kanji being "transferred in the jōyō kanji". The meaning of this is unclear. Were the characters transferred from or to the jōyō list? - dcljr (talk) 02:04, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Question about 蒼

I'm not entirely sure who to ask about this, so I'll ask it here.

蒼 in the old sense means green, but in today's sence, it now means blue, with a fairly new kanji 緑 now meaning green. My question is, how often is this kanji used in Japan? When do they teach this to new learners?---"THROUGH FIRE, JUSTICE IS SERVED!" 22:43, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Numbers

The article begins by saying that there are 983 jinmeiyou kanji. Then it says that there were 2232 jinmeiyou kanji before Sept. 27, 2004 (I assume the article means 1945 jouyou kanji plus 287 jinmeiyou kanji), with plans to add 578 kanji. 2232 + 578 = 2810. 2810 - 1945 = 865 jinmeiyou kanji. Then it gives a breakdown, showing 983 characters being added. On September 27, 2004, it shows "488 characters and 205 variant forms" being added, which added together produces 693; neither 488 nor 693 is close to the aforementioned 578. Also, the article claimed there were 2232 characters before Sept. 27, 2004, and therefore presumably 287 jinmeiyou kanji as stated above, but we see in the breakdown that the number of jinmeiyou kanji at that date was 480. Then at the end it lists 774 kanji (and claims to list 778). I presume that the "variant" characters before that list count toward the 983, but they are not counted. In conclusion: all these numbers are confusing! - furrykef (Talk at me) 08:26, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

More on this below. JimBreen (talk) 10:21, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Numbers - an update

There are indeed 983 jinmeiyou kanji. They are made up as follows:

• 755 kanji "straight" jinmeiyou kanji, expanded from the 287 applying before September 2004. All of these kanji are in the JIS X 0208-1997 set (of 6,355 kanji), and can be encoded in EUC, Shift_JIS, UTF8, etc.
• 19 kanji which are variants of other kanji among the 755. Of these 14 are in JIS X 0208. I presume the other 5 are in JIS X 0213, but I haven't confirmed that yet;
• 209 kanji are variants of kanji within the 1,945 jouyou kanji. Of these 126 are in JIS X 0208. Again the remaining 83 are probably in JIS X 0213.

755 + 19 + 209 = 983

Some good references are this page and this page (in Japanese). Most of these jinmeiyou kanji are marked in my KANJIDIC file, and remainder will be in the XML-format KANJDIC2 file once I update it.JimBreen (talk) 10:45, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Problem with variant characters

It looks like some of the variant characters cannot be displayed because of Han unification. For example, it says that 漢 is a variant of 漢 -- using exactly the same character both times. It's not just the font rendering them as the same character, either. If you use your browser's search feature to search for 漢 on the page, both of them will be highlighted, which wouldn't happen if they were two different characters being rendered with the same glyph. The point is, it looks like some of the variant character forms cannot be rendered correctly here. The only way we could do it is by finding these duplicates, moving them into an image, and putting the image at the bottom of the article. But I can't make these images because I don't know what the variant forms actually are... - furrykef (Talk at me) 08:20, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

You are right in that Unicode has merged many pairs of glyphs into a single code point, so there is no way of displaying them properly in Unicode. However, there are such a large number of such pairs there that one might as well make the whole list as a separate image if one is to undertake the task... -- 119.11.36.215 (talk) 19:45, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

It's true that Unicode unified some variants, but another factor is that the process of Unicode normalization which was added to MediaWiki in the past couple of years unifies some characters which do in fact have various codepoints for different variants. I have just marked all characters for which our table shows two identical variants. I don't have enough information handy to distinguish between the two possibilities though. Please add this info if you have it. — Hippietrail (talk) 04:25, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

I've just confirmed that every single variant character does in fact have a unique Unicode code point in the CJK Compatibility Ideographs block (F900-FAFF). The problem thus lies fully with the Mediawiki software normalizing the variants. I confirmed that editing the page to replace 798E with FA53 (with both the literal character or the escape character) gets renormalized to 798E when I preview the edit. QVanillaQ (talk) 15:59, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Simplied Chinese character(s) in this list

This list includes two characters which are not in any JIS standard according to the latest version of Unihan. 谒 (U+8C12) is displayed in the form of a simplified Chinese variant of 謁 (U+8B01) with a simplified radical never used elsewhere in Japanese and has only a G source in Unihan. 祸 (U+7978) also has only a G source in Unihan and is listed as the simplified variant of 禍 (U+798D). These look to me more like errors made by the contributor rather than being the result of Han unification or Unicode normalization. Can anybody double check them please? — Hippietrail (talk) 15:45, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

They were definitely errors. Good eye. -BRPXQZME (talk) 20:57, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Numbers again

The 480+ characters that had been discussed up to 2004 were clearly added, so I changed "withdraw" into "include". Also the one additional character was obviously included in the 484 that were eventually added. The claim that 480 characters were to be withdrawn from 290 characters was a mistranslation from a French relative sentence. Maybe the French version should be clarified accordingly, but my French is not good enough to judge or correct this. It then adds up to 290+484+209 = 983. But. The traditional writings are supposedly 192+19, which is 211 (not 209). But there are 194+19=213, so ovbiously more have been added (since 2004)? Anybody care to clarify? --Physiognome (talk) 07:24, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Kanji are not displayed properly

After this change http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jinmeiy%C5%8D_kanji&action=historysubmit&diff=293581336&oldid=293575997 changed kanji are not displayed correctly for me. Does anyone else get this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.32.79.13 (talk) 12:26, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

+2, 祷 and 穹

From ja:人名用漢字: 2009年4月30日、「祷」「穹」の2字を追加し、985字となる

On April 30th, 2009, two additional characters were added, 祷 and 穹, bringing the number to 985.

See also: [37] 森英介: 法務省令第24号 戸籍法施行規則の一部を改正する省令, 官報, 平成21年号外第93号 (2009年4月30日), pp.1-2. --Mkill (talk) 01:25, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

萬?

I had a Japanese teacher whose name is 萬本, therefore I assume 萬 (kyūjitai of 万) is also tolerated in names. Should it be added to the list?,
Ulmanor (talk) 17:18, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

• This is listed now that I've fixed the list of joyo variants. This is on the official list as a variant of 万.DCmacnut<> 07:06, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

List and number discrepancies fixed (I think)

I added the full 209 list of variant jōyō kanji to this article, as listed at Japanese Wikipedia and Japanese Wiktionary. The 209 joyo variants stand alone, and do not include the 19 variants of jinmeiyo kanji. Those are part of the standard jinmei list. The totals should be as follows:

• 756 standard jinmeiyō kanji
• 20 variants of existing jinmeiyō kanji (I've added the 20th that was missing)
• 209 variants of jōyō kanji
• Total = 985

If anyone notices an error in my copy and pasting, please correct as needed.DCmacnut<> 06:51, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Dec 2010 Update

I copied over the Japanese version and formatted to reflect the 2010 changes.

I think the Japanese version is incorrect about there being 632. I only count 631 + 18 variants in the MOJ's official list.

Plus the math of 2136 Joyo + 631+18+212 Joyo variants gives 2997 total characters, which is what the Japanese version says there are in total. 71.135.118.202 (talk) 05:03, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Question on 媛

媛 is listed under March 1, 1990 and November 30, 2010. Pardon my confusion, but shouldn't it be just one or the other? Or is it something I'm missing? 146.115.25.241 (talk) 23:45, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Traditional variants is wrong

The 18 items lists at the bottom contains the duplicates 渚猪琢祐禎 which are already in the lists above. The list really should contain 亙凛堯巖晄檜槇渚猪琢禰祐禱祿禎穰萠遙. --93.220.49.38 (talk) 23:09, 4 July 2012 (UTC)