Onna

Drawing of X2F25, X5973 or XF981

Term Onna (おんな) or "onna" may refer to one of the following three Unicode characters:
12069 (X2F25, ⼥), KanjiRadical
22899 (X5973, 女), KanjiLiberal
63873 (XF981, 女), KanjiConfudal

Onna may refer also to the set of these 3 characters.

Often, these characters are pronounced as "Onna" and refer to a woman, Human female , see picture below.

Onna, おんな

Characters of set Onna cause confusions.

Confusion

To year 2026, yet, no unique Unicode number is assigned to glyph ⼥. As the teachers of Japanese, as the manuals of Japanese just ignore the confusion. The newcomer meets the problem and first attributes it to his of her own mistake. Then, the novice sees, that the error reproduces, again and again, and, en fin, recognizes, that it is not his/her mistake, but the bug of the software, the dirty trick on side of the font designers, committed in order to trump the newcomers, and both the teachers and the manuals make this difficulty harder, keeping it in secret from the pupils.

The problem is related not only to learning Japanese.

Even a specialists, even a native Japanese speaker looking at characters ⼥ 女, 女 is unlikely to guess:
Which of them is character X2F25 ?
Which of them is character X5973 ?
Which of them is character XF981 ?

Term Onna is synonym of construction «⼥ or 女 or 女" for cases, when the only view of the Kanji is available, and it is difficult to identify it.

Not only Humans, but also some software confuse the characters with similar or the same glyph(s).

The default Mediawiki software replaces character XF981 to character X5973 without any warning.
This causes problems at automatic treat of data: in some cases the two objects are the same, and sometimes they are not. (Similar confusion takes place at the careless use of term «equality» applied to triangles in geometry).

In a text, that assumes any kind of citing, for example, copypasting to frame of a brouser or any search engine, the characters, corresponding to sound onna should be specified as X2F25, X5973, XF981 rather than ⼥, 女, 女: the software confuse the last two characters.

At least since year 2021, this confusion is recognized and described .

Other similar confusions related to the apparent bugs with graphical representations of the Unicode characters are described in articles «Chikara», «Miru», «Onna», «Sakana», «StickPi», «TsukiGatsu».

Unicode

At least three Unicode characters are related to sound Onna.
These characters are ⼥ X2F25, 女 X5973, 女 XF981.

The Utf8 encoding can be revealed with the PHP program onna.t;
it is copypasted below. File uni.t also may have need to be loaded.

<?php 
include "uni.t";
$a=unichr(0x2f25);
$a.=unichr(0x5973);
$a.=unichr(0xF981);
echo "$a\n";
$N=strlen($a);
echo "The array has $N bytes; here is its splitting:\n";
for($n=0;$n<$N;$n++){ printf("%02x ",ord($a[$n]) ); }
echo "\n";

$b = mb_str_split($a);
var_dump($b);
$M=count($b);
for($m=0;$m<$M;$m++) {
printf("\n");
$c=$b[$m];
$u=uniord($c);
printf("Unicode character number %05d id est, x%04X\n",$u,$u);
$d=strlen($c);
echo "Picture: $c uses $d bytes. These bytes are:\n";
for($n=0;$n<$d;$n++) printf("x%2X ",ord($c[$n]));
printf("in the hexadecimal representation and\n");
for($n=0;$n<$d;$n++) printf("%3d ",ord($c[$n]));
printf("in the decimal representation\n");
                      }
?>

File uni.t also would be loaded for the execution; then, command

php onna.t

produces the output below:

⼥女女
The array has 9 bytes; here is its splitting:
e2 bc a5 e5 a5 b3 ef a6 81
array(3) {
  [0]=>
  string(3) "⼥"
  [1]=>
  string(3) "女"
  [2]=>
  string(3) "女"
}

Unicode character number 12069 id est, x2F25
Picture: ⼥ uses 3 bytes. These bytes are:
xE2 xBC xA5 in the hexadecimal representation and
226 188 165 in the decimal representation

Unicode character number 22899 id est, x5973
Picture: 女 uses 3 bytes. These bytes are:
xE5 xA5 xB3 in the hexadecimal representation and
229 165 179 in the decimal representation

Unicode character number 63873 id est, xF981
Picture: 女 uses 3 bytes. These bytes are:
xEF xA6 x81 in the hexadecimal representation and
239 166 129 in the decimal representation

The similar analysis can be performed with more universal dumping routine du.t; here is the example of the use:

php du.t "⼥女女"

In such a way, the apparent sabotage, silent conspiracy of the font designers, authors of manuals on Japanese and teachers of Japanese force the pupils to learn Unicode, UTF8 and the programming in order to distinguish characters used in Japanese language.

Uniglif and Tarja

In the sci-fi utopia «Tartaria», the advanced font Uniglif is mentioned. Each glyph in that font is assigned the unique Unicode number, providing the bijective relation between the set of glyphs and the set of characters, at least for characters with number not exceeding XFFFF (ascii, TwoByteCharacters, ThrteeByteCharacters). With font Uniglif, no confusions similar to that above appear.

In the real life, while no analogy of Uniglif is available, the technical language Tarja can be used to avoid confusions. This is japanese-based technical slang that avoids ambiguous glyphs, avoid characters that are not yet supplied with default exclusive glyphs.

At the translation form Japanese to Tarja, for characters ⼥, 女 and 女, their explicit numbers X2F25, X5973 and XF981 can be used.

Alternatively, the transliterations «おんな» or «Onna» of «onna» can be used.

In addition, words borrowed from other languages («Female», «Mujer», ..) can be used in Tarja when it causes no confusion.

Examples

Dictionary Jisho suggest examples with sound onna :

おんなざか 女坂 mother; female parent​

おんなきょうだい 女兄弟 the easier of two slopes​

女姉妹 【おんなきょうだい】 sisters; female siblings​

おんなかぶき 女歌舞伎 girls' kabuki​

Censorship and Vestism

Inappropriate

Appropriate

Objects and subjects, denoted with term onna, often become targets of an aggression and/or censorship. Figures at right show the examples of images, inappropriate and appropriate from the point of view of vestism.

The religious motivated reasoning (see «Female logic») about "moral" and "ethics" is used by vestists for justification of aggression against "inappropriate" dressing; often females (onnas) become targets . Such a practice is described also in the sci-fi utopia about Meganesia by Aleksandr Rozov, see «Meganesia.Deportation».

Various branches of vestism allow some parts of the human body to be exposed; the schematic gradual degradation of the common sense in aggressive religions is shown in figure below. Counting, how many of dressing styles below are allowed by a religion gives the qualification of its tolerance with respect to onna in the 5 grade scale.

Warning

Publications about characters of the Onna set are collected and analyzed in TORI with scientific goals.

The analysis and the interpretation above should not be interpreted as an appeal for the extrajudicial execution of the font/unicode designers who did not supply some popular glyphs with unique Unicode numbers.

The more civilized solution would be to convince them to develop some realistic default analogy of the fantastic Uniglif, the font with bijective relation between glyphs and characters.

The description above may require correction(s) by a native Japanese speaker.

References

Keywords

«Bijective graphical representation», «Chinese», «Confusion», «Female», «Japanese», «Kanji», «KanjiConfudal», «KanjiLiberal», «KanjiRadical», «Onna», «SomeU», «Tarja», «Unicode», «Uniglif», «Utf8», «Utf8table», «UtfH», «Woman», «X2F25» «⼥», «X5973» «女», «XF981» «女»,