Hi,
At Sat, 31 Mar 2001 11:51:34 +0200 (CEST),
PILCH Hartmut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If the Japanese had wanted it to be easy to process CJK languages at the
> same time smoothely by computer, they wouldn't have introduced those
> monbusho reforms. Now I think it is fair that they must be patient with
> the limitations that result from this. Not a high price anyway. Maybe I
> shouldn't bring this political aspect into the discussion, but I think it
> is needed to explain why this subject is dealt in such a heated manner
> all the time.
No. Evolution of language does not occur based on needs of computer
technology. We are not a slave of computer technology. Inversely,
computer technology must be compliant to our culture. (Of course
computer is a part of our culture and can affect our culture. However,
this does not mean that needs of computer technology can rule the
culture.)
Imagine if you were find major amount of people insist that all of
us must use Esperanto and abolish all other languages, though you
want to use German or other languages? In real computer community,
CJK people are minority than European language speakers. Who can
defend CJK people's need other than CJK people?
I want to ask. Why almost of you are so heatedly eager to deny
our need?
> No, I just say that this difficulty of displaying japanese+chinese
> schoolbooks in XTerm is not a major concern for linux i18n. Moreover,
> I would suspect that most Japanese people will easily recognize it in
> a context where a certain tolerance to glyph variability is expected,
> such as a C+J terminal text.
What is "major"? It is natural almost non-CJK people don't care about
CJK languages and thus CJK-specific problem cannot be "major".
And, your level of "certain tolerance" is overexpectation for average
Japanese people.
> If Japanese culture politicians wanted to revise a part of the reform of
> the 50s and reunify at least some of the Han characters (as has been
> suggested by many people in CJK countries, including Korean president Kim
> Yongsam), the education costs would be even lower than those of the reform
> of the 50s. I wonder why noone in the Japanese information processing
> field was unreasonable enough to propose that.
Do you insist that CJK people should have common characters? Well,
I admit it would be great if it were realized. I imagine there are
some people who are (personally) working on this field. I will admit
the "reform" if it would be done and average Japanese people would
come to be able to read the reformed characters. However, such work
would be done beyond flamewar (which spcific glyph should be the
standard?) and many years (I imagine more than ten years) of hard work.
However, I am afraid even if such unification were realized, we might
have different glyphs again because language is living. For example,
American people use "color" instead of "colour". In CJK world,
character is like word. Sometimes a new character is made and
an existing character is modified in glyph. Such an evolution
is tend to occur in each language or in each country. Then we
will need different glyphs for CJK again.
I think this is not our topic now.
> I'd say that even these fonts should be complete unifonts that allow
> also Chinese and Korean text to be displayed, even if not with the
> perfect glyphs.
(I am afraid whether I understand your sentence...) Yes, we have
-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-{ja,ko}-*-iso10646-1. If someone developed
Chinese version, XFree86 should include it.
> I'd say "to be displayed perfectly according to all relevant national
> standards".
It might be OK. However, my focus is rather on our average knowledge,
though I admit it partly comes from compulsory (and higher) education
and the curriculum is determined by governments.
> Yes. With this it seems that C+J textbooks can be perfectly displayed even
> on xterm.
Sure.
> So are you proposing a way to avoid loading different fonts by
> incorporating glyph variants in the fonts and selecting them on the
> basis of language tags?
Though I don't know I understand your sentence, I am happy with
xterm-152-27 demonstration.
---
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/
