Abbreviated and nonstandard kanji

From Nathan Hopson:

I have been reading some handwritten documents from the 1960s and 1970s, and have been reminded that even beyond abbreviations, there were still "nonstandard" kanji in use. I guess this took me off guard mostly because these are school publications. On the abbreviated side, the most obvious example is:

第 → 㐧 The "nonstandard" kanji that interested me most were these two: 1. 管 → 官 part written as 友+、

2. 食缶 as a single character, but paired with 食 to be 食[食缶]

Neither of these kanji appear in Unicode as far as I can tell, which is interesting. Is there a similar situation in Chinese?

When I was on expeditions to Eastern Central Asia (ECA, aka Xinjiang), I often encountered such nonstandard writings.  Two very common ones were:

Xīnjiāng 新江 for 新疆 (the name of the province)

wǔdǎo 午蹈 for 舞蹈 ("dance")

From the beginning of the Chinese script till today, there have always been alternate and variant writings of the Chinese characters.  I will mention just a few:

Mawangdui manuscripts (and other archeologically recovered texts from the early Han and Warring States periods), where we find many characters, including dào 道 and dé 德 ("the Way" and "integrity; virtue"), written in diverse ways).

Dunhuang manuscripts, from the medieval period, which we've talked about many times on Language Log, are full of such nonstandard characters.  You can find massive documentation of them by looking under works like Dūnhuáng súzì pǔ 敦煌俗字譜 (repertoire of Dunhuang popular characters).

Lexical works such as Lóngkān shǒujiàn 龍龕手鑒 ("The Handy Mirror in the Dragon Niche"; 997 AD), which are full of thousands of such unusual forms of characters, many of which are known to have occurred only once in history.

See the numerous Language Log posts that document Chinese restaurant shorthand.

etc.

And how many different ways was Shakespeare's name written?

Selected readings

• "Massive miswriting" (7/25/18)
• "Whose standard?" (8/28/08)