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HarryCaul
HI! The Chinese title for Bruce Lee's final film, Enter the Dragon (1973), is always written as "龍爭虎鬥". However, every Hong Kong poster I've seen for the film uses a different character in place of the [虎] tiger character. I've been told it may be an old way of writing the tiger character... can anyone confirm this? Also, can someone please type this mystery character out so I can copy and paste it? If anyone can point to a webpage that talks about the history of the character and when the changes in usage occurred (and where -- Hong Kong, mainland, expat communities in Asia, etc...) that would be super helpful. Thanks!
Yes, it appears to be an old variant character for 虎, "tiger".
Here is a link to the page on character variants for "虎" found at the Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants put out by the Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan).
[140.111.1.40]
And here is an image of the known variants.
The character in the poster looks most like either the first one in the first row or the fourth one in the third row, in a Chinese calligraphic style, of course.
I'm always amazed at how much the poster makers know about Chinese characters.
I've seen other posters where they've used rare characters and wondered whether the average Chinese person really knows them. After all this is a popular movie. And that's the only title on the entire poster. So they (the average Chinese Zhou) must recognize the character; otherwise what's the point.
I don't know if the 2 variants have been included in Unicode (probably have, in which case, I'll probably have to look it up then).
Unicode is already mostly made up of Chinese characters. I think the percentage is in the 70s. The percentage was higher in the past. Probably in the 90s. But now they've included many character sets for really small languages or extinct languages. So now the percentage of Chinese characters in Unicode will never be in the 90s again.
Either they discover them in old texts, silk scrolls or whatever that they happen to dig up in some old tomb or find carved in some stone stele discovered in some obscure temple somewhere in the mountains, etc.
But they keep adding Chinese characters. With every extension to the Unicode, a few Chinese characters are added. Extension A, B, C, D, E, etc.
I think we're up to extension F now. It's ridiculous. I think, according to this page at the Unicode Consortium (I think that's what they're called) that they're going to include another 7473 Chinese characters. That's more characters than the average college educated Chinese person is supposed to know!!!
It never stops. I jokingly tell my friends, a joke I made up where a time traveler journeying into the future discovering extension FFFF with more Chinese characters, then going still further into the future and discovering extension FFFFFFFF having more Chinese characters and on and on to infinity.
Think about it. In the image above, there's 32 variants for the character 虎 alone. That's more characters than the entire Roman/Latin alphabet of 26 that they use for English put together. But for Chinese...
A complete Unicode font will be astronomically huge. Maybe even entire GBs or even TBs of drive space taken up. Just to be completist.
Stop the madness!!!!!
Sorry for the little rant. But it is kind of silly. Just one more silliness within the Chinese language world. ;-0
Kobo.