角川基金會計劃制定東亞“漢字”數據庫...

A few weeks ago the Yomiuri News on-line reported the following:

東アジアの「漢字」ＤＢ化…角川財団が計画

2015年01月05日 09時25分

　地域や年代によって様々な字形がある、漢字の情報をインターネットで一括して調べられる「東アジア漢字データベース」計画を、角川文化振興財団が進めている。

　ＫＡＤＯＫＡＷＡの漢和辞典「新字源」の一部をデジタル化し、漢字圏の研究者に呼び掛けてデータを共有、研究に役立てる構想だ。２０１７年をめどに、基本となる約１万４０００字の漢字の索引を作る。

　漢字は、日本の常用漢字、中国の簡体字、台湾などで使う繁体字など、地域により字体が違う。さらに古代の甲骨文字や書道の楷書、人名の異体字など、様々な字形があり、漢字をコンピューターで扱う上での課題となってきた。時代や地域を超えて、異なる字体や字形を網羅したネット上のデータベースがあれば、各地での文献調査や、人名、地名などの固有名詞を知りたいときにも便利だ。

(試譯文)

The Kadokawa cultural promotion foundation was advancing "The East Asia kanji data base" so that information on various letter-forms of Chinese characters would be collected together, based an area and time, in the Internet.

 While digitalizing the part on the "Newly constructed kanji" inside the Kadokawa Dictionary of Classical Chinese, researchers in the Chinese character region were invited to help sharing and studying the data. By around 2017 an index would be made on Chinese characters with about 14,000 words as a basis.

 Regarding the Chinese characters, depending on the area, its typeface was different from Japan’s commonly used kanji characters, from the Chinese simplified characters, and also from the traditional Chinese writings used in Taiwan. Furthermore, there were various letter-forms in ancient inscriptions on both animal bones and tortoise carapaces, and in block style calligraphy. Also there were characters beyond the standard form in the name of a person. It had been a problem in dealing with kanji by a computer. Going beyond the time and area, if there was a data base in the Net which collected different typefaces and letter-forms, it would be convenient for literature searching in all regions and also for knowing proper nouns: the name of a person or a place.

I think this project would contribute a lot to the cultural research in Asia.