Hi, On Fri, 26 Mar 2004 10:42:05 +0100, Arnt Gulbrandsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote... > Rick Block writes: > > And I think it's worth noting that many (perhaps most) people in Asia > > are not happy with Unicode (including UTF-8!) because of the "Han > > unification" effect. The basic problem is that Japanese, Chinese, > > and Korean all use a large number of the same "characters" and when
Not same but similar. The unification effort took characters with both a similar appearance and a similar meaning and lumped them together. The assumptions was that all of the versions would never be needed at the same time. Chinese and Japanese aren't usually mixed. It is kind of like lumping a Buick and a Ford into the same thing. Both Buick and Ford fans would be offended. For us it would be like saying E and F are similar so lets just have an E. P, R, D and B are similar so lets just have an R. > > mapping to Unicode these characters "lose" their language making it > > difficult to pick an appropriate font. Chinese characters CAN be > > displayed more or less intelligibly with a Japanese font (and vice less intelligibly > > versa), but to a Chinese person the result "looks" Japanese (and vice > > versa). > > I've been told that when Japanese newspapers print a Chinese person's > name, they use their regular Japanese font. Is that true? > > > Although "only a font problem", this is a problem interfering with the > > acceptance of Unicode (it's a cultural identity issue and, I think, > > will not be easily resolved). not just cultural identity but also cultural animosity. > Why don't these newspapers have the same acceptance issue? Probably for the same reasons that English newspapers are accepted when they print an Asian person's name using letters rather than kanji. Sure they could go to the trouble of having the Chinese and Korean fonts on hand for those rare occasions; but, Japanese newspapers are printed mainly for Japanese and not for Chinese or Koreans. Is it worth the trouble for them when in most cases the audience won't notice the difference? The people who are complaining are those for whom the difference is crucial; literary scholars, linguists and so on. > Arnt The main complaint is that the unicode charset loses the language/font association implied by national charsets and that the differences in the characters of the CJK fonts is enough to render the text unreadable. Imagine if English and Greek characters shared the same code points of a single charset. English rendered with the Greek font would be unreadable wouldn't it. English and Greek could not appear together in plain text. The differences are little more subtle with kanji though. Like changing every 'branch' to 'twig' or 'window' to 'glass'. To us westerners, the two characters would look the same or the differences be 'minor' and therefore considered unimportant; but, if a font were installed on my computer which swapped 'E' with 'F' and 'f' with 't' and lumped 'p', 'b' and 'd' together, I'b betinifely comblain abouf if. Regards, Mark Keasling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
