Extended shinjitai
Extended shinjitai is the extension of the shinjitai. They are the simplified versions of some of the hyōgaiji. They are unofficial characters; the official forms of these hyōgaiji are still kyūjitai.
Simplified forms
When the 1,850 character-long tōyō kanji list was produced in 1949, many characters were simplified from their original forms, and the new simpler forms became the standard kanji used in Japanese writing. For instance, the characters list, issued in 1981, contained additional simplifications such as to become shinjitai when the jōyō kanji'' list was created.However, as a result of adopting simplified characters, kanji that shared the same structural elements were not all simplified in the same way. For instance, s, although many exceptions to the rule exist.
Creation of extended shinjitai
The Asahi Shimbun newspaper developed its own script known as Asahi characters, which applied the rationale of simplification to characters other than jōyō kanji. In this script, the right element of the three previously mentioned unsimplified characters were all simplified as 売. Characters that were simplified in this way are called extended shinjitai, as simplification was extended to characters outside of the jōyō kanji list.Extended shinjitai was also implemented into JIS kanji. The first version of JIS, created in 1978, contained 10 characters that were simplified in this way, such as, created in 1983, was the first JIS character set to extensively use extended shinjitai, adopting simplifications for a large number of previously unsimplified characters. In total, 299 characters such as in its simplified form.
Formal | Extended | Notes | ||||||
鷽 and 鶯 are different species of birds, but both kanji share the same glyph within the extended shinjitai, namely 鴬. In China, the simplified Chinese character of 鷽 is | 鷽 and 鶯 are different species of birds, but both kanji share the same glyph within the extended shinjitai, namely 鴬. In China, the simplified Chinese character of 鷽 is | Within the ''* | ||||||
* | ||||||||
儘 and 盡 are merged to simplified | ||||||||
- Characters marked * are environment-dependent characters.
Reduction of extended shinjitai
Released in February 2000, the JIS X 0213-2000 character set was presented as a solution to the problems of the previous character set, as the Shift JIS encoding was expanded to re-include traditional characters such as 鷗, 瀆, and 潑. In December of the same year, the Japanese Language Council compiled a list of 22 widely used extended shinjitai and approved their use in place of their traditional variants in print.
JIS X 0213-2004 made minor modifications to the script, changing character shapes and strokes. For characters that are not in the jōyō kanji list, the shinnyō radical was changed from having a single dot into a double-dot variant. The Windows Vista operating system, released in January 2007, conformed to these modifications, but confusion resulted in cases where the single dot was automatically changed to double dots in, for instance, surnames written using the character wikt:辻.
The Asahi Shimbun newspaper also modified its characters to conform to the new standards, and altered their Asahi characters in January 2007.
In the latest 2010 jōyō reform, taking the aforementioned ⻌ radical as an example, the previous logic of one-dot corresponding to jōyō and two-dot to non-jōyō was eliminated, as for instance 謎 is now a jōyō kanji. This reform also clashes with established JIS X 0208 use, as in some cases less common unsimplified characters have been elevated to jōyō status in favor of variant characters with established use - for instance, as per the official jōyō table, the second character in 装填 should be 塡. For the most part unsimplified characters have been added to the jōyō table with this reform, except for three previous kan'ikanyōjitai, and some extended shinjitai like 艶 in favor of 艷.
Nevertheless, the 2010 guidelines by the Japanese government also explicitly allow simplification in handwriting and do not object to use of alternate characters in electronic text, likely in recognition of established technical standards.