Why Nobody Knows What 彁 Means

Xiang Yu (項羽) took down the Qin dynasty (秦朝) more than 2000 years ago divided the terriroty of Qin into 4 states (諸侯國). One of them is Han State (漢國) which was named after the Han Rive (漢水) and was led by Liu Bang (劉邦) who in turn defeated Xiang Yu and established the Han Dynasty (漢朝). The Han Dynasty was so powerful that even after the fall of the dynasty the Chinese people then still calls themselves Han People (漢人) and the characters of the Chinese language was subquently called Hanzi (漢字) or Kanji (漢字) in Japanese.

Also the og meaning of Han 漢 is milkyway and milkyway in chinese methology is usually refered as a giant silver river (銀河) in the sky, hence the water radical.

Putting the 彁 into Google Translate says it means "bleak" in Chinese.
Putting the 彁 into Google Translate says it means "lingering" in Japanese.

this just seems unnecessarily difficult

I'll hang out with you on friday Sam.

I really don't think the "needle in a haystack" metaphor needs a modern update. Looking for a needle in a haystack would be a nightmare not just because of it being a small object in a large pile, but also due to the needle being a sharp object which could easily hurt the searcher.

Ghosts in the machine.

Kanji seems like a really absurd way to build a language.

Or Waldo in a haystack

it would be funny to put those characters on a tattoo that will utterly confuse every japanese speaking person who sees it

the not-in-use-anymore wi and we (and no n) on the kana graphs are. interesting-

Let me guess, brother with a bow

if you have 12 whole characters you are not using for anything; instead of seething at it, invent a new use for them. They're already there.

Exhibit DCCCXCIX on why logography is a horrid idea

You used the wrong Jisc logo. Thats the UK Jisc

Would be funny asf if some of the ghost characters are just hoax someone put in as a joke. lol

hai sensei HAO

Petition to rename Akenbara 妛原. :P

Ghost characters seem super useful for fiction and world building, and it seems several Japanese creatives have already made use of them for this purpose from my research.

Good god that background music is obnoxious.

So you're telling me these would be perfect for tattoos. Cause someone would inevitably ask some version of ....
"do you know what those even mean?"
To which I could confidently respond...
"They don't mean anything!"
Then after some back and fourth I can show them this video.

I've figured it out!
妛挧暃椦槞蟐袮閠駲墸壥彁 translates to lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisici elit




Fun fact, to find these characters I had to go to the Wiktionary page for Ghost Kanji, where I learned 2 things:

1.) The order they are presented in here isn't random. They are ordered by their radical (so basically in alphabetical order, even if you can't read Kanji you can see that the 2 symbols with a 木 or 土 respectively on their left are next to each other).

2.) Other Ghost kanji that Wiktionary listed that aren't listed here are 碵穃粐軅

弓哥

Does this mean that there are 12 different ways to spell “nothing” in kanji?

The remaining mystery kanji have "bow" on the left part. What's radical to the right?

Reminds me of a Chinese artist who made a scroll "Book From Heaven" or something. None of the characters mean anything.

We should give these characters new meanings. Maybe by having the internet vote. That always goes perfectly! 😊

An unkown character with unknown origins would make the sickest logo for a metal band

i’m going to be 100% honest with you, dude you suck at comedy. please stop trying to be funny, we only come here for fun facts and stuff. your humor only takes away from the video.

“Jinmei” means “People’s Names” and indicates that people’s names can only use the Kanji in that block. The other block is of other common use Kanji that are not allowed to be used for a person’s name. For example, a couple wanted to name their daughter “strawberry” but the Kanji for strawberry, though common, is not a Jinmei Kanji and though they sued in court, they were still not allowed to use the Kanji for strawberry for their daughter’s name.

I just watched two consecutive videos sponsored by brilliant in a row

If i ever hit the lottery, i am emigrating to Japan.

I will make signs with the 12 ghost characters, and post them everywhere.

彁 Is, as stated, a Jojo reference.

Please excuse my ignorance, but if they have no pronunciation, how do you easily generate the unicode/character on a computer?

Where is the source of all this? That article you showed is behind a very persistent paywall hahha I would appreciate the sources!

these are either "spelling mistakes" or made up for naming purposes, for example, 祢 is a word which could be roughly translate to "deity/shrine", while the one with no meaning is missing a stroke on the right. another one that looks like a clear mistake is 墸, which looks like a misspell of 堵

Petition to make those 12 ghost characters into the new (shortened) names for the 12 months of the year in Japanese

Akenbara 𡚴原 is 5km north of Taga, in Kawachi, in the mountains on the east of the lake.

Unicode in no way have all characters used in all languages. While Unicode consortium is worried putting emojis there are a lot o characters used in languages spoken in India (yeah not all use Devanagari) that aren't in Unicode, some people can't write their names on a computer using Unicode. I am not talking about different glyphs or contextual ligatures (this is not what Unicode is all about): there are characters that have no codepoint in Unicode, and entire scripts too: Loma, Naxi Dongba (not dead writing systems they are in use). Some are in the pipeline to be added but there are more emojis on the pipeline than characters and the last change in the proposals is from 2020. Even some relatively common Chinese characters used in names are lacking on Unicode.

What if we gave them meanings

I'm going to print a t-shirt with these characters and wear it when I travel to japan.

I love you, Sam

Is this a JoJo reference?!

The logo used for Jisc in this video is for a UK higher education organisation, not the Japanese industrial standards Committee.

We can give them meaning, like the titles of contrarian video games.