Kubota-san, I too would be interested in seeing situations where there are practical problems.
I am skeptical about the real difficulty of understanding Japanese text with more traditional or "Chinese" printing. Of course it may be unusual, particularly if it is the first time you have seen a variant, but the skills required to understand them are the same as those required to learn the language in the first place. Most people don't stop learning new words in their native language when they leave secondary school, this is just more of the same. I personally have studied Chinese, Japanese and Korean, to one degree or another. In the course of my work in in Taiwan, mainland China, Singapore, Japan and Korea, I run into minor (and major) character variations on a daily basis and manage to puzzle things out. It is hard for me to believe that a Japanese person can't figure out the meaning of a character variant in context. Of course, we want to make things as attractive and easy to use as possible. I think that is done by simply having the default font match the user's expectations. Regards, Jake --- Pablo Saratxaga <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Kaixo! > > On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 09:31:31PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote: > > > > CJK characters unified are actually the same, with only > > > idionsyncrasic differences. A person not able to recognize > > > them won't be able to read a real life text with some > > > fancy fonts (like in ads for example), or a > > > hand written text, which have variations often greater. > > > > Not true. I am a native Japanese speaker. There are some > > characters whose Japanese version is very basic (and > > elementary school student can read) while I cannot read > > Chinese version. > > But are those unified? > Have you an example of a unified one in such case? > > > Many older Japanese people can read traditional-Chinese style, > > because Japanese people used to use the style until about 1950. > > But those are not unified. > Those that have two different codepoints in japanese encodings are > two different ones in unicode too. > > Maybe I'm missing something and there are indeed some characters that > are problematic; however I haven't encountered none. On the other > side I agree that my knowledge of kanji must be far below yours, > so maybe I just happen to not know the ones that are problematic > (among others I don't know either, of course). > > > Believe me, I read tens of ads every day (on TV and on newspapers) > > because I live in Japan. (Sometimes Japanese ads may use very > > difficult character which nobody can read. The purpose is just > > to give an authorized or intelligent impression.) > > I once saw a picture of an ad that have the kanji for "buy" > (I think, don't recall exactly) with its "shell" radical > replaced by a real picture of a real shell; if it wasn't > told in the text below the image what it was supposed to > be I wouldn't had discovered it, for sure. > > That reminds me of my uncle, who used to have a grocery, and > purposedly put texts with very weird letters as a commercial > practice: people were intrigated and come to ask what it was, > and that leaded to a more people buying something than if > simple "as everybody else does" texts were used. > > Well, I would highly appreciate some examples of unified CJK > chars with shapes diferent enough in C/J/K that they are > unreadable or near-unreadable to each another, that would > allow me to understand the problem. > > Thanks > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail! http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/ -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
