Hi, At Wed, 9 Jan 2002 09:23:23 -0500 (EST), Henry Spencer wrote:
> A small caution: *some* Japanese people think this is an issue. It is > very difficult for outsiders to assess *how many* do. We are naturally > hearing from the people who are most upset; it's hard to tell how > representative they are. I am an insider. I am a native Japanese speaker who was grown up in Japan and am living in Japan now. Yes, it is difficult for outsiders to assess *how many* do. Are you an insider, too? > Japanese authorities and scholars -- people who *did* expect to have to > deal with it on a day to day basis -- were involved in the design and > implementation of Han unification. This was not some hideous Western plot > foisted on Japan from abroad. Generally speaking, opinions of various scholars are much more various than common Japanese people. Some scholars insist abolishment of Ideograph at all, some insist usage of Latin script, some insist that much more Ideographs should be taught in school, and so on so on. However, most of such opinions are quite peculiar for most of Japanese people. Some scolars may have much more knowledges on literature and characters than average Japanese people and they may don't understand that average Japanese people have much less knowledge than the scholars. Sure, there are some people who think Unicode's Han Unification is a plot of Western people to destroy Asian culture. I think such an opinion should not be regarded. However, I don't think Unicode treats Han Ideogram in a good way. (I think the initial design of Unicode that 16bit is enough for characters in the world is apparently a bad idea. I don't understand why such a foolish idea was adopted in the initial version of Unicode.... Even Japanese elementary school students know that there are more than 50000 Han Ideographs.) --- Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.debian.or.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/linux-utf8/
