On Sat, 3 Feb 2001, David Starner wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 03, 2001 at 01:40:17PM -0500, Thomas Chan wrote:
> > The faction defending Han Unification should really be doing more arguing
> > why it is the "right" thing technically, irregardless of whether or not
> > Chinese support it.
>
> The problem is it isn't really a technical issue. The computer doesn't
> care whether Japanese and Chinese are unified, or whether simplified
> Chinese and traditional Chinese are unified. It just maps code values
There's more to "technical" considerations than computers, such as the
linguistic aspects--e.g., grammatology. That's why there are rules that
the IRG uses to determine whether two candidates are font-level variants,
or distinct characters that should be encoded at distinct codepoints.
(See the appropriate sections in the Unicode and ISO publications.)
> to glyphs. "A language is a dialect with an army" comes to mind - I'm
> sure that some scripts would have been disunified if they had a large
> number of users (the different runic or old italic scripts, or coptic/greek),
> and I'm sure that others would have been unified if they weren't huge
> modern scripts (i.e. cryllic/greek/latin).
Yes, I'm sure that is the case, if it isn't because of source separation
for the interests of round-tripping. (e.g., Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic
are distinguished in JIS X 0208 and all other East Asian character sets
modeled or inspired by it.)
In an alternative universe, some Indic scripts might have been unified
with synchronically existing forms, or diachronically with ancestral
forms, e.g., Tamil and Malayalam, Devanagari with Gujarati, Thai with Lao,
etc. (These are just examples--I am not disputing how they were encoded.)
On the other hand, it looks like recent versions of the Plane 1 roadmap
are now saying that Jiagu (Shell and Bone)[1] script, the proto-Chinese
script, is to be "unified with CJK":
http://www.egt.ie/standards/iso10646/plane1-roadmap-table.html
(In earlier revisions, it was listed as being unclear. I don't know what
the details of the decision were.)
[1] "Koukotsu" in Japanese.
Thomas Chan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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