Unicode Demystified

Chapter 10. Scripts of East Asia

Now we come to the last of the four major groups of modern scripts. This last group comprises the East Asian scripts. In particular, it covers the various writing systems used to write Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and (prior to the 1920s) Vietnamese. These scripts are often referred to collectively as the CJK scripts (for “Chinese, Japanese, and Korean”), or sometimes the CJKV scripts (for “Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese”).

This group of scripts is fundamentally different from the others. Recall that all of the European alphabetic scripts either descended from the Greek alphabet or arose under its influence. All of the bi-di scripts of the Middle East either descended from the ancient Aramaic alphabet ...