Z-variant
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In Unicode, two glyphs are said to be Z-variants (often spelled zVariants) if they share the same etymology but have slightly different appearances and different Unicode code points. For example, the Unicode characters Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+8AAA Script error: No such module "Lang". and Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+8AAC Script error: No such module "Lang". are Z-variants. The notion of Z-variance is only applicable to the "CJKV scripts"—Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese—and is a subtopic of Han unification.
Differences on the Z-axis
The Unicode philosophy of code point allocation for CJK languages is organized along three "axes." The X-axis represents differences in semantics; for example, the Latin capital A (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+0041 A) and the Greek capital alpha (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+0391 Α) are represented by two distinct code points in Unicode, and might be termed "X-variants" (though this term is not common). The Y-axis represents significant differences in appearance though not in semantics; for example, the traditional Chinese character māo "cat" (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+8C93 Script error: No such module "Lang".) and the simplified Chinese character (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+732B Script error: No such module "Lang".) are Y-variants.[1]
The Z-axis represents minor typographical differences. For example, the Chinese characters (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+838A Script error: No such module "Lang".) and (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+8358 Script error: No such module "Lang".) are Z-variants, as are (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+8AAA Script error: No such module "Lang".) and (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+8AAC Script error: No such module "Lang".). The glossary at Unicode.org defines "Z-variant" as "Two CJK unified ideographs with identical semantics and unifiable shapes,"[1] where "unifiable" is taken in the sense of Han unification.
Thus, were Han unification perfectly successful, Z-variants would not exist. They exist in Unicode because it was deemed useful to be able to "round-trip" documents between Unicode and other CJK encodings such as Big5 and CCCII. For example, the character Script error: No such module "Lang". has CCCII encoding 21552D, while its Z-variant Script error: No such module "Lang". has CCCII encoding 2D552D. Therefore, these two variants were given distinct Unicode code points, so that converting a CCCII document to Unicode and back would be a lossless operation.
Confusion
There is some confusion over the exact definition of "Z-variant." For example, in an Internet Draft (of Template:IETF RFC) dated 2002,[2] one finds Script error: No such module "lang". "no" (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+4E0D Script error: No such module "Lang".) and (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+F967 Script error: No such module "Lang".) described as "font variants," the term "Z-variant" being apparently reserved for interlanguage pairs such as the Mandarin Chinese Script error: No such module "lang". "rabbit" (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+5154 Script error: No such module "Lang".) and the Japanese Script error: No such module "lang". "rabbit" (Page Template:Mono/styles.css has no content.U+514E Script error: No such module "Lang".). However, the Unicode Consortium's Unihan database[3][failed verification – see discussion] treats both pairs as Z-variants.
See also
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References
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- ^ a b Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Glossary". www.unicode.org.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Huang, K.; Ko, Y.; Konishi, K.; Qian, H. (April 2004). "Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean". tools.ietf.org.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Unihan Database Lookup". www.unicode.org.
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