Your Keyboard Cannot Comprehend These Noodles

How did it take 50 years to be able to type this character: 𰻞𰻞麵 Biang Biang Noodles are one of the staples of Shaanxi in central China. They are world famous for their name, written in 58 strokes, being one of the most complex Chinese characters. But computers weren't always up to the task of typing Chinese. In the early encoding schemes of China, Japan, and Korea only a few thousand characters were supported. While this was enough for daily communication, it wouldn't be until Unicode and the process of Han Unification that these separate character encodings would become compatible.
Today's Unicode supports 149,813 characters in several different Unicode blocks and spanning several planes. The Biang character, both the traditional and simplified version were added to Unicode 13.0 in 2020 at code point U-30EDE and U-30EDD respectively.
While it took nearly 50 years from the advent of the personal computer to when we were finally able to type these characters, hopefully it will take less time for other variant characters to be supported in the Unicode Standard.
Early CJK encoding tables:
kanji.zinbun.ky...
Unicode chronology
www.unicode.or...
Unicode first press release
www.unicode.or...
Unicode standard principles:
www.unicode.or...
Unification of Han Characters:
www.unicode.or...
Requirements of proposal form:
www.unicode.or...
Unicode 1.0 chart:
www.unicode.or...
www.unicode.or...
Ideographic Research Group:
appsrv.cse.cuh...
Writing Biang Biang:
• Démonstration de calli...
Relevant Papers:
“■”字文化解析
“biáng”字的文化解读
他 山之石 ，可 以攻玉
Biang就一个字
再说biangbiang面
retro computer by Blake Stevenson from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)

[@InkboxSoftware]

𰻝𰻝面 𰻞𰻞麵 Without proper font support the above characters may not render correctly, resulting in a blank box.

[@Bryce_the_Woomy_Boi]

There's a translation, and it only translated the top right one

[@easylemon6640]

I see 030 EDE box?

[@mme725]

Renders for me on my phone alright 👍

[@Archbtw_]

As I use Arch btw with almost no fonts installed, almost every chinese character is not properly rendered for me. The top right one (面) works though.

[@yesterdaysrose5446]

I ordered a noodle, but got tofu instead! /stupid joke Seriously though, my Android phone displays the character, my TV doesn't. The KZbin TV app really struggles with character support. I don't understand why Google doesn't just ship the Noto font with the TV app.

[@captainufo4587]

I buy the penniless scholar origin for the character. I can see the scholar writing a character with a couple of strokes, looking the shop owner's face whose expression said "you ate 300 yuans worth of noodles, you fat ass. Better make this worth it", then kept adding strokes until the shop owner got either annoyed or satisfied.

[@golwenlothlindel]

Ok, but there's a simpler explanation: The character is the instructions for making the noodles. I mean, there are a lot of strokes there that aren't giving you any idea what the word sounds like: so what is their purpose? They tell you what it means. They illustrate the very specific type of noodles, by literally telling you how they are made. This is how most other Chinese characters came to be, so it would be surprising if it wasn't true for this one. Most other characters have just had several hundred more years of being worn down and simplified. This does lead to a funny question though: who was making noodles with a goddam sword? 😂

[@RAN480L64]

@@golwenlothlindelI think he was just trolling making a simple word so complicated, or maybe complimenting how good they were😂

[@justit1074]

@@golwenlothlindel in chinese, the "dao" (sword), character can refer to any bladed implement, including knives, in the case of these noodles, they are of the knife-cut variety

[@MeepChangeling]

@@justit1074 Well that's stupid and ineffishent. That's almost the same as letting the word "shirt" mean any article of clothing.

[@justit1074]

@@MeepChangeling which is where compound words and context come in

[@cmyk8964]

Fun fact: Certain fonts, like Source Han Sans SC/TC, compose the sequence “⿺辶⿳穴⿲月⿱⿲幺訁幺⿲長馬長刂心” into the single biáng character.

[@mrmimeisfunny]

"Make a function that returns the character count of a unicode string" Junior: "Easy" Senior: *sweats*

[@mi2ebi]

it's just a ligature- there are the same number of characters, but the font is doing fancy things that make it *look like* one character. technically it shouldn't do this, IDSes are not meant to be ligated because they are ambiguous sometimes

[@mrmimeisfunny]

@@mi2ebi Code points are not characters.

[@microcolonel]

It depends on the platform.

[@microcolonel]

​​@@mi2ebi Unicode actually doesn't have anything to say about ligating IDSs either way. It is not necessarily defined, kinda like soft-hyphen. Also you are mixing up characters, glyphs, codepoints, and grapheme clusters... they are all different things. Arguably ZWJ should be required for ligating IDSs but that's not defined either. TL;DR you are not qualified to be lecturing people about Unicode trivia lol

[@puffcap_]

theres no way in hell eating those noodles makes that sound

[@sofia.eris.bauhaus]

oh yeah? watch me: biang biang i just wrote that by eating noodles 😎.

[@Anhonime]

yeah, onomatopoeiae are a mystery for me, I can rarely feel any connection between the actual sound and the onomatopoeia the Indo-European ones feel kinda basic, there's not that many of them and they aren't used often, so I don't mind them, but when I was learning Japanese, it was a wild ride - they use so many and Japanese is so phonetically restrictive that I just can't find any relation to the original sound, it feels as if they were just making s#1t up putting aside the ridiculously specific ones, how tf do you pretend the heart beat goes "doki doki" and how does it end up being a real expression, not used solely in baby talk, like "yeah, seeing that girl makes me go boom boom" (no offense to the Japanese people, ofc, I have a lot to say about other languages too, we're all silly in our own ways (and it's just my subjective view, maybe you can really hear "doki doki" in the heartbeat sound, idk), the Japanese onomatopoeiae are just something that made me reaaaaaly confused at first and stuck with me forever)

[@Weeping-Angel]

The sound doesn’t come from eating the noodles, but from making the noodles.

[@simonlow0210]

@@Anhonime Heartbeats sounds a bit like "duk duk" to me, which is close to doki-doki

[@devilshelby]

@@Anhonime just making a wild guess here as a french canadian that only french and english lol. I noted at 3:41, when there's mention of *hanzi*, the "i" sound was WAY different than what I made in my head when reading that word (i would have expected the "ee" sound like in "bee"), to me it sounded more like sighe-ed "ha" or "uh" if I had to write down the sound. For shit and giggles, I was expecting to hear "hanzee" lol. Anyway, that observation, grouped with @simonlow0210 saying "duk duk", are what makes me sorta see how someone japanese say that *doki doki* is somehow accurate to them??? I saw the phrase a lot, but never heard it. If they do say "dokee" (same as the "bee" exemple), then I'm just as confused as you are cause I can't for the life of me find an "ee" sound in a heartbeat!

[@mrmimeisfunny]

If anyone is wondering why the planes were 94x94, they wanted to make it somewhat ASCII compatible so that code that relies on the ASCII space or the control codes will still work.

[@cmyk8964]

Yeah, there are 95 printable ASCII characters, but one of them is the space.

[@Gurdia]

Thank goodness China donated those codes to the red cross, with the big shortage that happened in the 2030s there's a lot of poor companies not able to afford to buy a code for their logos, those extra codes are gonna go a long way!

[@shamancredible8632]

what about that virus they donated a few years ago

[@metalema6]

300 years from now an historian is gonna stumble through this video and think the dates displayed on youtube can be off by a few decades

[@bendover9620]

​@@shamancredible8632What virus? The only known virus that was spread during thst time was the "Great White Monkey Virus that destroyed the World but our Great and Powerful Leader Xi Jingping who wore the ring of the Glorious Mao Zedong saved the world and turned it into the People's Repulic of Peace and Harmony" ? Are they gone? Screw you China!

[@chickenosaurus_rex]

@shamancredible8632 that's not even funny anymore. Stop making covid jokes.

[@khadizaanwarjolly5779]

@@chickenosaurus_rex ngl shit got me rolling so your point is redundant

[@j.joseph5353]

Fun fact: While 'western' countries tend to have spelling bee's for children, China has game shows and contests for adults based on who can correctly write Chinese characters. Unlike spelling bee's that typically rely on asking words that are rarely used, the Chinese shows usually use words that people commonly use while speaking.

[@Ballin4Vengeance]

I do use supercalifragilisticexpialidocious at least weekly

[@PokaP]

Writing Chinese characters is hard but Japan has shows where they ask to even read those words because they don't work logically like in China

[@mvevitsis]

Correction: Korean used Chinese characters (mixed script) in the same way as Japanese up until around the 1970s, since then the number of characters used has rapidly fallen but they are still used as abbreviations or for disambiguation.

[@krunkle5136]

That's a shame tbh. Language should be complex a beautiful,not dumbed down.

[@stgigamovement]

BWTC32Key uses Korean Mixed Script to store data in text as efficiently as possible

[@-----REDACTED-----]

@@krunkle5136 A writing system has nothing to do with the complexity or whatever purported non-complexity of a language. A writing system is merely a representation of a language and neither adds nor detracts from that language’s complexity.

[@mvevitsis]

@@-----REDACTED----- getting rid of mixed script is probably related to their functional illiteracy problem (highest in OECD)

[@krunkle5136]

@@-----REDACTED----- that's true for a phonetic writing system that tries to represent a spoken language, but if the writing system consists of unique glyphs to represent words that don't indicate sounds, then it's adding its own complexity.

[@malegria9641]

from my five years of learning chinese this is one of the few characters i can still write from memory due to how much time i spent goofing off in class writing it

[@lpyibm5333]

一点一横长，二字下来口子方，两边一个丝角角，你也长，我也长，中间夹个马二郎，心字底，月字旁，打一锤放一枪，打个钩钩挂文章

[@martaleszkiewicz5115]

Which version?

[@TrasherBiner]

Do this ﷽ next (it's a single Unicode character for some reason, character U+FDFD).

[@埊]

'In the name of Allah the merciful'? yeah, he is a bit tad bit too long.

[@emperorfaiz]

@@埊 You forgot the "the forgiving and" after "Allah". I was surprised the whole Bismillah phrase is included in Unicode.

[@genericalfishtycoon3853]

Throw in ﷻ while you're at it!

[@RenderingUser]

It's not some reason. It's very common in usage. I have fonts for English that turns every English letter into a differently stylized form of that Arabic phrase. So I can imagine that it's pretty useful.

[@blakksheep736]

I'm really impressed my computer can render that.

[@Bluehawk2008]

When the first CJK standards were being established in the 80s, I don't think the screen resolution of computers could even properly display 'biáng' in line with other text. The brush strokes are so dense it would end up looking like a solid block of colour and incomprehensible. Even when it's painted large on a store sign, looking at it from a distance, you understand the character more from context than by visually parsing it.

[@poka26ev2]

Fun fact: There is a word in Chinese that a plant radical with a 口 with 9 木’s inside, 9, the most we got is 3 木林森, the characters was added, victory for Asia

[@bfbunny]

As someone who had trouble sending my Guangzhou friends the name of this noodle when I got a taste of it in Xi’an, I am glad that you made this video so that I can learn more about my mother tongue

[@fnoigy]

English is a hot mess, but I'm sure glad it uses letters

[@Tsuruchi_420]

I'mma be honest, no existing language uses the Latin alphabet in clear way, it's all weird shit

[@angeldude101]

@@Tsuruchi_420 Latin from my understanding uses it pretty well, though I guess you could argue it's no longer "existing." Every non-Latin language using the Latin alphabet though? No arguments there.

[@TheV-Man]

​@@Tsuruchi_420German uses it pretty well.

[@kreuner11]

​@@Tsuruchi_420wrong, there are much better applications of it

[@MD.Akib_Al_Azad]

Just English, Most others have rules, they're still messed up but it's easy to understand all the nuances but for English, every word has something different

[@sean..L]

I remember when I was bored in school I used to look up crazy Unicode characters and save them like a collection.

[@pistachos4868]

I don't know much about unicode and even less about Chinese typography, but this video shows me the incredible evolution that educational videos have had over time, it is impressive the amount of things that are taken for granted in our realities (me being someone who has lived only using Spanish and English characters, which are almost the same) but that in other parts of the world are essential to take into account to be aware of what it means to be part of this technological globalization process.

[@janmagtoast]

I thought you just called the character noodles bc it's so complicated and mixed up and laughed my ass off. But it's actually about noodles what

[@Hijiri_MIRACHION]

I love the visuals of a character for noodles being represented with noodles.

[@humbleopionist4366]

yea Chinese gets really really weird sometimes, just like English. You don't really think about it but refrigerator, and fridge. why does fridge have a d in it? Languages are just weird like that sometimes.

[@thanksforyouropinion2682]

If you remember its alt code, you could type every character in the unicode.

[@mrmimeisfunny]

No you can't. You can only type the characters in ISO-8859-1 and Codepage 437.

[@SquooshyShark1000]

the alt code is the same as the codepoint number basically isnt it? atleast thats how it is for me

[@Solitaire001]

I often use Alt-132 (ä) so that I can write Agnetha Fältskog's name correctly.

[@fnoigy]

Next time Amazon claims they can't pay their employees more, can't enforce quality standards, and must raise prices, just remember they dropped $400 million so their logo can be a typable letter.

[@TheBcoolGuy]

And that's not even the worst thing they did in 2027! 😠

[@elanjacobs1]

@@MightyJabbasCollection Thanks Einstein

[@blark5]

​@@elanjacobs1yeah obviously they did worse things in 2027

[@DoubLL]

I am honestly very confused by that claim. The date in the video is in the future, I can't find a source, the JISC still exists and the Amazon logo is not in the unicode standard. It seems to me like that is just made up, which unfortunately calls the entire video into question.

[@TheWolfboy180]

no, it's a joke@@DoubLL

[@ollie_]

Really great video and super interesting topic. Unicode is such a fun thing to learn about, mixing languages and computer science, I don't know why, but I always found the concept of standardisation fascinating

[@InkboxSoftware]

I get that, I love to just browse the Unicode charts and see every character perfectly organized. Always something interesting to find.

[@ollie_]

@@InkboxSoftware I really need to learn how characters are stored and the logic behind it, seems extremely interesting. I've been reading a book about how Chinese script survived through big western technologies (telegraph, computer, etc), even tho the book doesnt go much into details and is written more like a story. It made me want to learn more about it

[@sponge1234ify]

​@@ollie_i would like to know this book. Sounds like a nice commute read!

[@stgigamovement]

I love Unicode, and I've found quite a few interesting things in it over the years, some of it being symbols that have meanings in niche circles that ironically don't know their symbols are in Unicode. I've found multiple instances of this.

[@madshorn5826]

Encoding is one thing, writing another. If Chinese characters can be ordered in tables, why not choose tables with the arrow keys and then home in on a single character by dividing the tables in 4×4 grids each divided in 4×4 grids, etc.etc. Choosing a single character among a million would only require 10 keystrokes in such a 'double binary' search. By ordering the tables after usage common characters could be pointed to with 3-4 keystrokes and the rare ones with 11-12 keystrokes. No more than western words typed out ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯

[@fromixty]

I have never clicked on a video this fast yet. Love your content, please keep it up. Gonna watch the video now.

[@marcel1372]

"bro are you gonna pay for those noodles" *starts furiously writing*

[@signbear999]

I'd say a large part of Unicode Hanzi was taken up by Chữ Nôm, ancient Korean variants, and unique names. (also recently researched ancient documents, ex. the Dunhuang manuscripts.) Looking at the consortium's newest decisions, it seems most of the newly added characters fall into these categories. I have a copy of the Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, but it only contains Chinese characters (just around 51000 of them.) I checked, no biang. :( Morohashi must have never been to Shaanxi.

[@lpyibm5333]

well there's nothing to do with korean

[@signbear999]

@@lpyibm5333 I'm talking about when Korea used Hanzi.

[@zyaicob]

Calling the consolidation of the CJK standards "Han Unification" was pretty funny

[@jggouvea]

I believe the PRC approves strongly.

[@science-recon7392]

Well, they’re uncontroversially ‘Han Characters’ (‘漢字’) and referred to as such in Chinese, Japanese and Korean so the name probably wasn’t that controversial.

[@lycandusk7263]

i guess you technically call it "han solo"

[@sponge1234ify]

Ironically, like others have said, the "Han" in "Han Unification" is probably the least controversial part of that project. It's like launching a "Graeco Unification" for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic consolidation (and throw in Cherokee for good measure). The naming itself makes sense, but _why would you want to do that._

[@JubilantJerry]

But why call it the Han Unification instead of the Kan Unification?

[@slkjvlkfsvnlsdfhgdght5447]

at first, i actually thought that the title was a dig against the chracter. like, this character is so convoluted that you call it "noodles" 😂

[@unnaturalselection8330]

Living in Xian, I eat biang biang mien at least once a month. They're WAY better than what's pictured here.

[@whimsicalhamster88]

Good for the Biang Biang noodles. They finally got their character in Unicode after all.

[@fen4ri]

i like the selection of extra symbols in north Korean typing... it implies that the of the 10 weather conditions of north korea, 3 of them are comunist, and 1 is just general danger all around.

[@feynthefallen]

That character wouldn't only be impossible to type, it would also be impossible to draw on a screen in any reasonable font size, since it would only be a shapeless pixel purree.

[@Jagrofes]

Low key impressed that there is a single character that is so complex it needed to wait for 1080p to be the standard resolution for typing it to be viable.

[@champion_ofcloud-var]

delicious

[@jonothanthrace1530]

"biang biang" sounds to me like the sound of a spring, which makes me imagine that the legendary scholar was calling the noodles extremely rubbery.

[@odinson4184]

That’s a good thing. If your teeth don’t hurt while eating hand pulled noodles then they’re shit.

[@lpyibm5333]

it do is the original meanin啦

[@Frommerman]

Well he wouldn't have been calling them rubbery. Rubber trees aren't endemic to China, they wouldn't have had the concept of rubber until closer to the modern era.

[@lpyibm5333]

@@Frommerman well rubbery in Chinese is 劲道 which has nothing to do with rubber.

[@Emma-iu7sr]

Those noodles are springy and tough and chewy at the same time - in a good way! I know in Chicago there’s a restaurant that does good biangbiang noodles called Xi’an Cuisine. If you ever visit Chicago and feeling curious, you could give that a try!

[@670839245]

For those watching this in the future: This video is released in January 2024. Anything after 12:11 are a joke.

[@RECURSIVE_MATRIX_LOGIC]

Was thinking about the calendar being used. In Buddhist calendar, the year 2567 has just begun, so no match there. 😄

[@nikGhost1]

I wish the Unicode would be properly implemented in to windows. Quite often I work with files in foreign languages (non Latin based alphabets) and I have to use special software to fix the text on the American computer I have to use.

[@InkboxSoftware]

Amen brother, I've been there

[@nikGhost1]

@bruncher49 txt files also always broken

[@Hijiri_MIRACHION]

I download plenty of files from Japanese sites, this happens more often than you'd think.

[@Bobbias]

Some of these problems are due to people or software still using the outdated regional encodings like shift-jis (for Japanese), or windows-1251 (for Cyrillic) rather than utf-8. There's no way to always correctly detect what character encoding text is actually using based simply on analyzing the raw bytes present in the message (though statistical approaches can guess with reasonable accuracy most of the time). So software often just defaults to assuming everything is utf-8 unless explicitly told otherwise.

[@GarrettPetersen]

I have made biang biang noodles before! Never saw the character for them. The hardest part of making authentic biang biang noodles is that you're supposed to boil them in slightly alkaline water.

[@MariaNicolae]

Why is that hard? Can't you just dissolve a little bit of some basic chemical (e.g. sodium bicarbonate) in the water first?

[@yksnidog]

11:43 It's like a game of find the differences... It differs only in the lower middle. There is a k-like structure, than a y-like and the k-like again in the simplified (left) one. They are altered into fence like structures with some lines underneath in the normal (right) one. The more I see these writing systems from asia the more I think of repeating patterns within these which just aren't uniformed. But maybe I'm totally wrong.

[@Mmmm1ch43l]

yes, the small structures are called radicals. In this case you indeed just get the simplified character by replacing all the radicals in the traditional character by their simplified counterpart. How characters decompose into a common set of radicals has been studied. Look up a Chinese dictionary for example, they usually use these structures to make characters searchable. And iirc these were also used in some text input systems. It's just Unicode which wants to have one codepoint per grapheme and thus doesn't want to deal with the whole logic of which radicals can be combined in which arrangements to make which characters.

[@yksnidog]

@@Mmmm1ch43l Thanks for the explanation.

[@christheawesome2423]

It is the year 3000. Every single letter/character in every alphabet in every language has been replaced by “biang” with every possible variant to unify the world as a giant bowl of biang biang noodles

[@Slayerwy]

😿

[@krembananowy]

Really nice reporting! I had no knowledge of CJK digital representations' history beforehand, and this video taught me a lot.

[@thanksforyouropinion2682]

2:13 you mistyped VSCII into VISCII in the subtitle. they're 2 completely different encoding of vietnamese.

[@InkboxSoftware]

Thanks for the catch, it has been corrected now.

[@ikkue]

10:45 Great use of the interrobang in the subtitles

[@Shol-Beok]

Glad to see im not the only one who noticed

[@Mica-kb3pj]

I find it amazing that China, Japan, and Korea (and not to mention other nations) were able to put their differences aside and so quickly unify their standards to the Unicode we know today.

[@rionthemagnificent2971]

Maybe the regions of each symbol should cast an official symbol for their location and then submit the combined package of symbols to the Unicode group. Since these noodle dishes vary with each different region, they should have their own unique identifier.

[@Green-pm6wk]

Great video! It was both hilarious and felt extremely in-depth and informative :)

[@denischen8196]

Has anyone created a recursive fractal chinese character that can be zoomed in infinitely?

[@Yora21]

Interestingly, even though it looks very complex, it's actually made up of super basic elements. Writing this from memory by hand should be really easy.

[@Takoto]

God I Love the history of text encoding so much Great video!!

[@MindboxHost]

I think the biggest challenge with representing the biang character digitally in text is finding a resolution that can display it properly, lol.

[@Frommerman]

I DO NOT WANT BIG NOODLE TO WATCH ME

[@jeffrey8979]

Can't wait to see the symbol of the invincible Worker's Party of Korea added to Unicode. How am I to show my undying love for the Dear Leader and my eternal devotion to Juche if I can't type it? On this note, another interesting thing I read is that North Korea also tried proposing the addition of 6 new characters reserved especially for writing the names of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. While those characters are included in the basic Korean character set, the proposed new additions were to be in a special emphasized font to honor the leaders. They also interestingly opted to repeat the characters for "Kim" and "Il" twice. They also wanted Unicode to change the labeling from Hangul and just call them "Korean characters," a compromise because North Korea uses the term Chosongul rather than Hangul.

[@keiyakins]

the 16-bit initial version of unicode is frankly the biggest mistake in text encoding history and we're *still* dealing with the fallout. If they'd just specified that there'd be further planes from the word go, we wouldn't have the nightmare that is unpaired surrogates.

[@Bobbias]

And if utf-8 had been the default from the start instead of utf-16, programmers wouldn't have to deal with windows using utf-16 internally everywhere.

[@prosfilaes]

Nobody uses UTF-32 today. In 1990, when Unicode started, typical PCs had 1 MB of memory, which would barely fit a decent sized novel English in Latin-1, and half a novel in UTF-16. Unicode really only superseded 8-bit codepages with Windows XP and Mac OS X. There are many on the Unicode side who still think a 32-bit Unicode in 1990 would have been dead in the water.

[@keiyakins]

@@prosfilaes sure, they could still use an encoding other than UTF-32 that's fine, but it should have been made clear that it wasn't going to *stay* 16 bits from the word go.

[@feisty-trog-12345]

My understanding is that there originally wasn't supposed to be any planes other than the initial BMP (U+0000 to U+FFFF). UCS-2 (back then synonymous with "Unicode") didn't have a way to encode any characters outside of that range and so 65000 characters had to be enough for everyone. When Unicode 2.0 realized that it was not in fact enough for everyone, they had to somehow wring additional bits out of UCS-2. The hack was to define a new category of "Unicode scalar value" which was just all the code points, except a previously unused range (U+D800 to U+DFFF), commit to never assigning those code points to any actual character, and ban any Unicode encoding from encoding these code points. As a result, UTF-8 and UTF-32 are now encodings for streams of 21-bit unicode scalar values (the surrogates didn't have enough bits to get a 32-bit encoding) and the range U+D800 to U+DFFF is awkwardly excluded. Clearly, none of this was planned originally.

[@prosfilaes]

How do you release a 16-bit Unicode and expand to a 32-bit Unicode later on? UTF-8 has stray high-bit characters, just like unpaired surrogates, and any 16-bit character encoding is going to need some sort of surrogate encoding to reach higher values.

[@charlielee2334]

This noodle has a more convenient name in China called 油泼面 (noodle poured with chili oil) since majority of Chinese don’t know how to write it

[@lego102lego]

They are different things, biang biang mian has very wide noodles, making it different to the normal kind

[@lego102lego]

You can see both at 0:31

[@Tsuruchi_420]

5:09 i live that the north korean standard just NEEDED both communist emoji and some stuff for the weather, amazing

[@thatoddshade]

the whole kulupu pona and I are still waiting for sitelen pona characters to be added to unicode.

[@cmyk8964]

Wondering why 94×94? Out of 128 ASCII code points, 95 are printable, one of which is space.

[@euclideanspace2573]

Japan: Auctions one slot of an almost dead standard to a conglomerate China: Free slots to the Red Cross That was funny.

[@AA-ux6gg]

Please tell me about Japan more I curious

[@euclideanspace2573]

@@AA-ux6ggIf you aren't aware, that was a joke the author of the video made.

[@coreblaster6809]

Simply looking at the symbol in the thumbnail, I recognize all of the components. How could it not be typable with an efficient and smart engineering solution?

[@Dr._Geno]

I just really hope to see the question comma, and exclamation comma make it into unicode, I mean we already have the Interobang, (a question mark exclamation mark hybrid) as well as an upsidedown interobang.

[@Mollie-qn3kr]

the way you connect with us viewers is just amazing!

[@k.vn.k]

I can write that. Chinese is easy, it’s basically a combo of several familiar letters.

[@rickwilliams967]

Also, Han Unification sounds like a historical event, but not about letters. Like some sort of treaty or something.

[@안홍준-z1l]

I live in south korea, and 6:53 last line sounds 'rerp-ryun-sswan-baubs-kyaul' or 'rep-ryun-sswan-baub-kyaul'. and well... its biang? not a byang?

[@feynthefallen]

I hear at this rate, in about three years we'll run out of space in unicode due to the emoji explosion.

[@thezipcreator]

slight correction, unicode isn't itself an encoding. it's a mapping from numbers (codepoints) to graphemes. UTF-8 is the most common way to encode unicode codepoints as text (mainly adopted since it was backwards compatible with ASCII).

[@ShinkoNet]

legend midi file by hiroyuki oshima was not what i expected hearing at the outro lmao

[@esrohm6460]

the simplified biang? my brother in chirst there is nothing simplified about that character. your saving like 4 strokes of 80 thats like 5% more simple

[@RenderingUser]

Well, any simpler and it wouldn't look the same

[@esrohm6460]

@@RenderingUser have you seen some of the simplified kanji. they basically are just caricature of the original one

[@stgigamovement]

I'm a Unicode geek and I find this video intriguing!

[@ILostMyOreos]

This is a really cool and fascinating intersection of linguistics, computer technology and history

[@juckyvortex]

Why do I now want a Tatoo of the character of these noodles?

[@notfeedynotlazy]

And this, boys and girls, is the reason why alphabets and sillabaries are intrinsically superior to ideograms: you don't need years of standarization to order noodles over whatsapp

[@cattysplat]

Limiting language also limits your ability to express yourself. Limiting communication to fit in digital formats is always a compromise.

[@user-qwertyuiopasdfghj]

Superior or not depending on the perspective. Hanzi is what unites Chinese throughout history. Otherwise we would be different nation states like in Europe. And once one grasps logogram reading is actually faster

[@notfeedynotlazy]

​@@user-qwertyuiopasdfghj Uh... are you SERIOUSLY claiming that the reason that Europe is not a monolitic single country is that they don't have a common writting system, *_while using to write your statement the common European writting system?_* Tsk, tsk. Kids today...

[@mrmimeisfunny]

Wait until you try to order noodles in Arabic or Urdu and the person on the other end gets the text backwards and unshaped

[@notfeedynotlazy]

@@mrmimeisfunny Could be worse - could be Zaps Dingbats 😀

[@Monkeymario.]

12:20 Hold on, 2043!? Oh right they use different time and year stuff

[@skinnypotato4452]

biang biang giving the vibe of the longest turkish word, which is "muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine"

[@hunterchichester5720]

What's it mean?

[@olegtarasovrodionov]

2:49 "But the first Japanese encoding scheme, the Japanese Industrial Standard X 0201 from 1969 did not include any Kanji" but included 円年月日時分秒

[@Lestibournes]

It seems like all the Chinese characters are made up of a standard set of components. Shouldn't it be possible to make each component be a character. Then you type in the components by stroke order and mark that the word is finished. The components then gat rendered together as a single character.

[@stgigamovement]

Unicode happened at a time when computers couldn't do that in a reasonable amount of time.

[@bocbinsgames6745]

In some input systems like Wubi that's how you type the characters out However unicode decided to code point and so it is what it is now

[@深夜-l9f]

most of it yes. back then people drew then they simplified it, some simplified stuff resembled each other so they tried to distinguish but sometimes it's forgotten. there are many variants, many different ideas so you can't combine all of them together to make one unified single working system. if that was possible we would have one chinese empire throughout the history. the only binding thing is culture honestly, how much you cultivate yourself.

[@golwenlothlindel]

So part of the thing is that all the components *are* characters on their own AND they make up other words. All the radicals and phonetic components actually mean something and are commonly used on their own. For example: this is yī "一". It means "one", and is also used similarly to a definite article. Combined with jué "亅", it makes dīng "丁". The thing is that "yī jué (一亅)" is an entirely reasonable phrase for someone to type: it means "one arrow". So how does the computer know whether you mean to combine the characters, or keep them separate? Even worse, if you type "一一一" did you mean to say "1 1 1" or sān "三" meaning "three"? The computer doesn't know. Nowadays of course, this is possible and it does exist. It's called the "cangjie input" system. Though that is still relying on the underlying unicode system: it's just a more reasonable input system. The reason why you can't just assign each component to a code point and be done is that they can drastically change shape depending on which part of the character they are in. It's like superscript and subcript in chemistry: most older word processors couldn't do those, and youtube comments still can't. Even worse, it would be difficult for the computer to determine whether a given character was a semantic or phonetic component within the block: there are many characters with the same components but in different places. Lastly: this is qī "七" meaning seven. Spot the yī. A tilted line in any given character *could* be a radical, or it could be part of a semantic or phonetic component. Most people don't know which it is without looking this up in the dictionary.

[@Lestibournes]

@@golwenlothlindel in the examples you gave, the answer to "how does the computer know if it's one word or three" is answered by whether the user put spaces between the characters or not, which I believe I mentioned in the original comment.

[@edwardtan7283]

Is this supposed to be food video or a history of computer science. I'm confused since I subscribed to both.

[@chamuuemura5314]

Is biangbiang very different than 刀削麺? In Japan they’re both listed as as 西安麺 but I’ve only had 刀削麺. 刀削麺 is delicious but biangbiang looks wider and even better. I actually prefer the aesthetics of 30EDE over 30EDD. It has the fullness and prestige of a historic noodle.🍜

[@user-qwertyuiopasdfghj]

Yes they are different. 刀削麵 is directly cut from a dough to the boiling water, while Biang Biang is handpulled. Glad you enjoy them I am also a fan of Japanese Ramen

[@riza-2396]

刀削麺 is literally knife slice flour, while Biangbiang is hand pulled, but only pulled once, different from Ramen(which is actually Chinese La mian 拉麺, literally pull flour, it is pulled for many times so it is not as wide as Biangbiang）

[@SwordQuake2]

Type != display and/or store the character

[@Maxjoker98]

I hope the red cross takes good care of their code points. I wonder what they will use them for... Probably just a bunch of red crosses :D

[@mrmimeisfunny]

And if you dare to use them they will sue you for trademark infringement.

[@Wobuffet3]

what's that music at 6:06?

[@Holfax]

Westerner watching ending: "how the heck is that 'simplified'?" 😄

[@krio1267]

3:58 with the clusters of the "hanzi / kanji" i cannot see the difference

[@danielbriggs991]

That was real funny when you said "a 94×94 plane" 😄

[@danielbriggs991]

And then almost all the end ones actually got me, I thought you were talking about the year it is scheduled to be implemented

[@epremier20050]

this was an amazing video on the quirks of the unification of CJK fonts, and the part of the different ways of writing Biang made me realize that OTF file formats already have implementations of allowing font variations (i.e. tabular numbers, alternate forms of lowercase a or g, small capitals, etc.) with simple flags, and I can easily imagine one can set various versions of the same character with those aforementioned flags -- it's all the matter of having the font makers be able to make those variants themselves.

[@ArchOfWinter]

For characters already this complex with very specific use case, does it even need simplification? Even if you are illiterate, something this complex becomes iconic, doesn't need to be actually read as text, it becomes a symbol like a corporates logo or an arrow. Even the most literate couldn't write it off the top of their head, simplifying it won't change anything. It's like that town name in the UK with a very long name, you don't need to know how to spell it to recognize that town.

[@holyknightthatpwns]

Actually, as someone who knows how to write in traditional characters, it's not that hard to write. The top hat and the bottom giant L are a common combination that you often write other parts inside, and all the bits in the middle like the 長 and 馬 and 月 and 信 are very common pieces. When you consider that some of those components are duplicates, it's only like 8 characters to remember, which is not that hard to remember. It took me a ton longer to memorize the name of Llanvire....gogogoch.

[@tja4501]

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

[@埊]

that hat is the roof or cave, 宀 or 穴, that L is the road, 辶@@holyknightthatpwns

[@bocbinsgames6745]

It has a simplified form due to pattern matching components: e.g. 長 -> 长, no one actively simplifies every character in existence

[@Doomwarden13]

I mean, yeah, it's a symbol or branding of a sort, not a character that most people will use in practice. It's kinda a stunt character. The apocryphal origin stories indicate as such. I really don't think this is a telling story of Chinese or unicode. Its rly more like how prince 'changed his name to a symbol' and everyone just called him (the artist formerly known as) prince.

[@elacher]

There is a really annoying beeping sound comin from the left side audio at 7:02

[@Doomwarden13]

This is actually just a dumb stunt. It's meant to be hard to write and its... hard to write. (-ish, I mean it's just got alot of components). A simplified version of the character would function just fine, as would writing it out in pinyin or some other phonetic script.

[@SuperWindows78]

9:41 I see one of the symbols I used

[@paiwanhan]

I'm sad that you completely skipped over Taiwan's encodings such as Big-5 (1983) and CNS 11643 (1983). For much of the 80s and the 90s, Big-5 was the most popular encoding in the Hanji sphere, including Hong Kong, Macao, and for a while even used in Shenzhen China when it became the first Chinese city to open up to the global market.

[@ZILtoid1991]

What would happen if I poured biangbiang noodles into my keyboard? Would that help?

[@UltraNyan]

Typical meme kanji, just slap a bunch of characters together to make a bigger one.

[@InkboxSoftware]

𪚥

[@UltraNyan]

@@InkboxSoftware i think i need to buy a 4k screen

[@beyondobscure]

鬱@@UltraNyan

[@埊]

龘@@InkboxSoftware

[@FunctionallyLiteratePerson]

Not kanji, hanzi

[@SnapshotOfASoul]

I wonder if someone compared writing speeds with other widely used character sets, who would come out the fastest?

[@tigerboy4705]

I would imagine a language like english would come out on top, chinese would have far fewer characters, but the time to write each one is higher

[@Arsenic71]

Nice prediction for 2034 there 😉😁👍 For the actual problem there seems to be a simple solution: We all order by number in chinese restaurants. So just make Biang Biang Noodles "number 248" or something like that. Problem solved.

[@tigerboy4705]

Wdym with number 248?

[@pigletshut]

No mention of BIG5 out of that little paradise south of China and Japan? It too is a big part of the CJK encoding history. Plus the Hong Kong / Cantonese specific characters that began as a supplemental set within BIG5, and later incorporated into Unicode CJK ideograph extension B block.

[@davidlloyd1526]

TLDR - for a time, there was not a consensus about how to draw the characters as it varied across China. Two of those symbols were added in 2020.

[@remka2000]

In the same time, simplified chinese is kinda hard for Japanese readers 😅 This is why google created the noto font bck in the day (noto stands for "no tofu" tofu being the square blocks you see when the font is not available. I guess unicode hs some limits too...

[@dan2te2]

I really like using random Unicode characters, it's quite interesting to see different symbols!

[@gabrielv.4358]

I never EVER expected to see unicode having more than 1 million characters, wow!

[@appa609]

After a certain point, Unicode really does seem like just making stuff up.

[@georgedeng8646]

4:12 What? Hangul was created in the 1400s, and Hanja(Chinese characters) were still used along side hangul until the 1960s.

[@tfist]

always wondered about the biang character input limitations, but was too lazy to research it. huge thanks for this video!

[@pwnmeisterage]

I never bother to install support for fonts and languages I can't read. I see little placeholder boxes. Sometimes it wrecks the layout of websites/etc. That is unfortunate. But it's just as unreadable either way. At least this way I have less bloat running on my machines, lol.

[@JJMcCullough]

Fantastic video! I learned a lot. One question though, why did the early Korean fonts include so many Chinese characters?

[@InkboxSoftware]

You'll have to check out this article here (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja), it'll give an overview of the history of characters being used in Korea. The Korean language has been bound to characters for thousands of years, while the Hangul alphabet has only reached its current popularity in the last century, but even now characters still have a distinct role in the written language. Although I've met a lot of people who say that characters are pretty useless in Korea nowadays, they are still used in certain contexts, in proper nouns, ancient terms, and literature. I think it would most likely be a combination of those factors that led to the inclusion of characters even in the earliest encodings. Interestingly, even though North Korea now has a strict policy to try to avoid characters, they too still included many thousands of characters in their early encoding as well, so it may not be purely for the Korean language, but a way to ensure compatibility with software from China and Japan. By the way, big fan of your work.

[@JJMcCullough]

@@InkboxSoftware thanks! I don’t read Wikipedia but your description was intriguing. I’m now curious to see examples of Chinese characters used in modern Korea.

[@kalakim8537]

​@JJMcCullough Hey, friendly youtube korean here. I have some example for you Winning streak(연패) and Losing streak(연패) have same pronunciation in korean. Yes you read this right, I typed same Hangul twice. Only difference is hanja here, so we write 연패(連覇) or 연패(連敗) in newspapers because it is important to every sports team fans

[@usamanasher3900]

Just write it on a piece of paper and fax it... Chitty chitty biang biang

[@alinagrinseit]

5:46 dude “the orient”? seriously?