A Spectre is Haunting Unicode
www.dampfkraft.com
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).
  • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
    111·
    11 days ago

    This article is underwhelming. Despite being in English, it links to a Japanese Wikipedia article. The English Wikipedia article has all the same info as this post and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_characters

    tl;dr: some Japanese kanji from older encodings were carried forward into new ones. But some of those characters were difficult or impossible to identify. Most were archaic place names or transcription errors.