Hi, At Wed, 9 Jan 2002 19:45:56 -0800 (PST), Jake Morrison wrote:
> 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. Are you saying about "Hashigo-Taka" vs "Kuchi-Taka" (which cannot be distinguished in Unicode nor in JIS, U+9AD8) or "Kuchi- Yoshi" vs "Samurai-Yoshi" (U+5409)? Or, "traditional" versions for person's names (like U+8FBA vs U+908A vs U+9089, U+6FA4 vs U+6CA2, and U+5EE3 vs U+5E83)? These are EXCEPTIONALLY famous and adult Japanese people can read. And more, I cannot believe you met such characters everyday. What jobs did you do in Japan? Publication? Customers' service (who can meet various Japanese family names with difficult characters)? Note that even many Japanese people don't know characters which are used in family names. Thus, a person with "difficult Kanji" family name has to explain how to read the Kanji on introducing himself/herself. Place names also. Or, are you talking about abbreviated (non formal) characters for Mongamae (gate) radical and so on which are only used for hand-written characters? If you prepare an image file, I will be able to explain it. I don't understand what you are saying. I fear you are talking about some exceptional cases (it is likely that you don't understand what is common and what is exceptional, because you are not a native speaker) and people who read your explanation can think it is general. --- 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/
