Hi,
At Mon, 02 Apr 2001 19:31:04 +0100,
Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The question ultimately is a political one, namely whether the scholars
> assembled in the IRG or the Japanese ministry of education has the
> "right" view on what defines a distinct Han ideograph and what not.
You confuse character and Variant. IRG and Ministry of Education don't
disagree. IRG's view is Variants are same "characters". Education
of Ministry of Japan defines standard "Variants". Your opinion is a
political trial to slander Ministry of Education and Japanese education
system. IRG respects Japanese standard and Japanese "Variants".
> It is ultimately historically the same script no doubt.
Yes. However, this fact cannot be a reason of your opinion. For
example, Greek, Cyrillic, and Latin characters have common origin.
However, none of us (including me) insist we should have common
characters and all of us should be re-educated to use the common
characters.
> Practically, there is no big problem, because Japanese people just
> can use Unicode fonts that follow strictly the Japanese ministry of
> education guidelines for those ideographs that are widely used in
> Japan and no doubt we will eventually have a very rich collection
> of such fonts.
I agree almost. Your way is enough for "localization" purpose,
like MS Windows does. (MS Windows uses Unicode for localization
purpose. "Japanese version" of Windows has Japanese font and can
handle Japanese text). However, Unicode is, unlike conventional
or "legacy" encodings, international. Using Unicode allow for
Japanese and Chinese to co-exist in a same text file. Even non-CJK
people can use Han Ideographs. Which character should non-CJK
people use?
> Imagine we introduced the ISCEW (International Standard Code for English
> Words). Should "color" and "colour", "night" and "nite", "through" and
> "thru" be assigned different code points or isn't it the same word in
> the end?
Both way (different code for "color" and "colour" or same code for
them) have their own advantages and disadvantages. Ok, Unicode stands
for "same code for them" policy. It is easier to search "color" and
"colour" in the policy than in "different code" policy. However,
when someone wants to distinguish them, very complex mechanism is needed.
How about person's name? For example, can "Hofmann" and "Hoffman"
be united?
I don't want to discuss which policy is better, "Variants are different
glyphs of the same character" or "Variants are different characters".
It makes no fruits. Unicode has been already developed under "same
character" policy and this cannot be changed. I just want to say
that "same character" policy has a certain disadvantages and we must
admit the fact. (Of course "same character" policy has a certain
advantages). My interest is on how this disadvantage can be handled
within the Unicode policy.
---
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/
