Research and development of a dataset for historical and regional kanji variants

2023 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 20K20711
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Research (Exploratory)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Medium-sized Section 2:Literature, linguistics, and related fields
• Research Institution: National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Takada Tomokazu 大学共同利用機関法人人間文化研究機構国立国語研究所, 研究系, 教授 (90415612)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): 守岡 知彦 京都大学, 人文科学研究所, 助教 (40324701)
• Project Period (FY): 2020-07-30 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: 漢字字体 / 異体字 / 文字情報交換

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Using the approximately 400,000 kanji characters accumulated in the "Hanzi Normative glyph" (http://www.hng-data.org/) as basic data, we analyzed examples of usage of variants of kanji character back in context, compared them with headwors in old Chinese and Japanese dictionaries, and compared them with variants in the tables created in various research fields. Then we have conducted research on the development of a dataset of kanji variants in time periods and regions, which can be referred to in cross-search.

Free Research Field

日本語学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究の意義は次の2点である。
(1) 漢字字形の時代差・地域差を、漢字文献の実用例と、漢字字書・辞典による規範の二側面から通覧し得る資料体の構築に知見を与えること
(2) 人文学諸分野間での「異体字観」の相違を明らかにし、違いに対する認識を共有した上で、分野差による字形解釈の違いを資料体に記述する方法を提案すること