Hi,
At Fri, 6 Apr 2001 07:34:03 -0700 (PDT),
Jake Morrison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The effort to understand what U+76F4 is in context is hardly that
> big a challenge, compared to what the average student has already
> faced before.
I don't think so.
1. The fact we have learned many years never mean that we can learn
more. If we were have to learn additional characters only for
Unicode, it would mean that we lose time otherwise we might learn
more useful thing.
2. A mere technology such as Unicode must not rule our languages.
When we have to learn exotic Ideographs such as ancient Chinese
literature, we learn these characters since it is worth doing.
It is a literature and a culture. On the other hand, learning
characters in order to be compliant to Unicode is never worth
doing. Unicode is mere a technology. Why must we be compliant
to a technology? Technology must be compliant to our culture.
3. U+76F4 is an example. There are many more characters we have
to learn or guess. Guess sometimes takes mistake. For example,
Chinese U+76F4 looks like Japanese U+76F4, U+67FB, U+767E,
and U+771F. There may be more examples.
> In Taiwan (where I live) there is a much larger number of
> characters in use than in Japan, and this sort of thing will
> happen to the average adult on a regular basis. It certainly
> happens to me, as a non-native speaker of Chinese and Japanese.
It is true. However, we learn characters only when it is worth
doing.
Imagine that Unicode were unify Latin and Cyrillic characters.
For example, Latin F and Cyrillic EF, and Latin N and Cyrillic
EN (looks like H) are united. Latin and Cyrillic have common
origin (just like Chinese and Japanese Ideogram) and evolved
in different ways (just like Chinese and Japanese Ideogram).
Thus, Han Unification rule can unify Latin and Cyrillic.
(Please forget source separation rule now - For example,
KOI8-R and EUC-JP can express both Latin and Cyrillic.)
You can use language tag or something if you really want to
distinguish Latin and Cyrillic. The cost of learning is not
so big - only 26 uppercases and 26 lowercases for English
speakers, much less than we would have to additionally learn.
However, I imagine Latin and Cyrillic people never accept
this idea.
---
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/
