Hi,
At Fri, 30 Mar 2001 22:27:09 +0200 (CEST),
PILCH Hartmut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am very familiar with zh_CN, zh_TW and ja_JP, which may be my problem:
> I can perhaps not imagine the viewpoint of a Japanese reader who has never
> read anything except monbusho standardised Japanese -- no Kanbun, no
> old Japanese books, no calligraphy. There may of course be more such
> people than I realize.
Ok, you seem to learn Japanese more than I do for tens of years
and use Japanese more than I do everyday (Of course, almost all
I speak/hear/read/write is Japanese). However, you seems to
know less about knowledge of average Japanese people than I know.
It is true that most Japanese people have never read old Japanese
books (such as Story of Genji, Hyakunin-issyu, Houjouki, and so on)
in old Japanese handwriting, nor Kanbun (writting of Confusius,
Lao-tse, and so on) in original typeface. Then what conclusion
comes from this fact? Do you insist we must study them in original
writing? Who pay the cost (in money, time, human resource, and
so on so on) for such education? Are you a millionare? Do you
have strong connection to Japanese politicians? Is that cost
worth paying?
> That is still a very small difference.
On what basis do you insist it is a "very small" difference?
I imagine you know very well about what visible difference is
important and what visible difference is not important.
(For example, you must know the famous example of "mud" and
"soldier" ideographs. On the other hand, you must know the
very different looking of "human" in Mincho typeface and
handwriting style, though we have similar "enter" ideograph.)
Do you insist Japanese people must learn the Chinese version
of U+76F4? Again, who pay the cost of education?
> My point was that one need not go too far in trying to be perfect on these
> issues in environments such as XTerm. But as it turned out, there was no
> need to discuss about this at all, since perfection can be achieved using
> the language tag.
You seem to confuse two level of perfectness.
1st level: we need different fonts with different glyphs for CJK,
like -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-{ja,ko,zh}-*. In this level,
XTerm can use one of them for its whole life of process. For
localization purpose (assume Japanese people read/write Japanese
text only), this is enough.
2nd level: we need some method to dynamically choose proper font
according to the property of the text, not according to the
users' locale environment. This is needed for further
internationalization or multilingualization which allow foreign
language to be displayed. (For example, a Chinese who want to
learn Japanese or vise versa.)
I thought we are discussing about the 1st level, because you
insist we can use unified font for Han Ideogram. On the other hand,
language tag is used for 2nd level.
Ok, XFree86 will have different fonts for CJK (semi-1st-level-compliant)
and XTerm will support language tag (2nd-level-compliant).
> It is of course a bit unfortunate that we have to load different fonts for
> all the tags.
...
I agree. I imagine if Unicode were so designed that we don't have
to discuss about such problem, i.e., Unicode were have a different
policy of Han Unification. However, the fact is that at least
Japanese people cannot read Chinese glyph and Unicode unified these
characters. Fact is just a fact. We have to recognize the fact and
manage this situation.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
