Sima

Term Sima or Shima may refer to one of the following 5 Unicode characters:
㠀, X3800
島, X5CF6
嶋, X5D8B
嶌, X5D8C
嶹, X5DB9

Also, term Sima may refer to the set of these five characters.

Also, Sima may be used as a generic name for an island, part of land of moderated size (not smaller than a meter, but not bigger than Australia), surrounded by water: ocean, sea, lake, river or swamp.

Motivation

No difference is detected in pronunciation of characters of sima.
No difference is detected between meaning of characters of sima.
For these reasons, in the first approach, these characters are treated as the same.
In such a way, sima appears as class of equivalence of the Unicode characters

㠀 島 嶋 嶌 嶹

In order to see them well, in the line above, these characters are enlarged.

Use of such classes of equivalence is expected to reduce the job about systematization of elements of Japanese language to 20% of its initial (convention) requirements; as the basic, grammar, pronunciation and semantics are supposed to be invariant with respect to replacement of these characters within the class of equivalence.

However, the custom meaning, i.e., that is written "between lines", is lost at such a vulgarization. Therefore, after to establish the simplified grammar of Japanese language, the nuances can be added, taking into account the frequency of appearance of these characters, dependently on geographic area, on the epoch, ethnics of speakers or writers, etc. For century 21, in Japan, character 島 seems to be more usual, than other versions of sima. While we do not care about geography, nor about history, the single 3-byte character 島 can be considered as approxiate of term sima. (In the similar way, in the most of usual cases, the Newtonian mechanic can be considered as a good approximation of the quantum mechanic).

Encoding

The Utf8 encoding of characters of suma can be revealed with command

php du.t 㠀島嶋嶌嶹

However, program du.t should be loaded; it calculates the codes of the characters, that are encoded with 3 bytes. This program seems to be sufficient for analysis of symbols of English, Japanese and some other European languages.

Pronunciation

Characters of sima can be pronounced as "Shima" (and this gives name to the term) しま.

Characters of sima can be pronounced as "tou" , トウ.

Semantic

Characters of sima denote an island. No other meaning, specific for some of the sima characters, is detected.

Graphic

Characters od sima appear as combination of character yama (for example, 山) and character tori (for example, 鳥).

For menemonic, one can imagine the following evolution of the sima kanji:

First, the most complicated character 嶹 had been used.

Then, due to unsufficient resolution of the printing equipment (with manual handling, before computers), the right hand side of character 嶹 happened to be not distinguishable from a little bit squeezed character tori (鳥); that leaded to character 嶋.
Indeed, with the small font, it is difficult to see difference between pictures 嶹 and 嶋.

For the improvement of perception, character yama has been moved to the upper side of the kanji, giving character 嶌.

Then, in order to see better the limits of the Kaji character, the "yama" is moved to the bottom, giving 㠀.

Finally, for simplification, the four sticks at the bottom of the upper element are skipped by the lasy (and rational) writers and typiographists and, of course, the readers. Due to simplicity, character 島 becomes most usual.

At creation of the unicode, the developers wanted to keep possibility of writing sima in all the 5 historical ways; so, all the 5 pictures of sima got their encoding and the graphical representations. These characters can be used in personal names of subjects or objects; however, at the pronunciation of the character, either the graphical representation is necessary, or the number of the Unicode character child be specified: is it X3800 or X5CF6 or X5D8B or X5D8C or X5DB9 ?

Keywords

Chinese, Japanese, Kanji, KanjiConfudal, KanjiLiberal, KanjiRadical, Unicode, Utf8, X3800, X5CF6, X5D8B, X5D8C, X5DB9, 㠀, 島, 嶋, 嶌, 嶹