Tomohiro-san, Henry is not attacking you. He says that we cannot judge the opinion of Japanese people from one example, no matter who. You hold strong opinions, and tell us that many Japanese feel the same way. We do not know how many feel the same way, and we would like to inquire further. None of this impugns your integrity.
It is the same as the requirement of the scientific method of inquiry. When one researcher comes up with a certain result, others must duplicate that result before it can be fully accepted. Wherever a theory is applied to new situations, it must be verified yet again. So you are being accorded the respect due to a researcher. That respect implies the obligation to accept the challenge of extending the evidence for your ideas in the face of doubt. For more than 80 years, since the eclipse expedition of 1919, researchers have been devising ever more fiendish tests of Einstein's General Relativity. He is the greatest modern physicist precisely because his theory has stood up to the tests and continued to provide new knowledge. It would be totally disrespectful of Einstein *not* to continue to test his theory. On Thursday 10 January 2002 11:20 pm, you wrote: > Hi, > > At Thu, 10 Jan 2002 15:16:36 -0500 (EST), > > Henry Spencer wrote: > > > What's wrong about this position? What bias do you think? > > > > There is nothing wrong with this position, but your own strong > > opinions make you a rather biased source for information on how > > Japanese in general would react to today's Unicode. > > What is a "strong opinion" do you think? Yes, I have a strong > opinion that Unicode should be usable for Japanese people. Who > don't think so? Do you think that Unicode don't need to be useful > for Japanese people? We agree that Unicode should be usable for Japanese people. We do not know how many Japanese people think that there is a problem with Unicode. I don't think that the problems you cite are serious, even though you do, but I am not attributing my opinion to other people. I wish to ask them what they think. > > My original posting was directed not at you, but at others in the > > list, who seemed to be assuming that you represented a consensus > > of Japanese opinion. That could be true, but we should not just > > assume so. > > If you think I don't represent average Japanese people's opinion, > what do you think about the true average Japanese people? How do > you prove it is a "true" average? We do not propose proof. Ideally, we would want someone other than you to query a statistically valid sample, not self-selected. You are self-selected, as I am, and a sample of one says nothing about a population. Again, this is not a criticism of you. You cannot answer for Japan as a whole, any more than I can answer for the U.S., or even for all polyglot Buddhist Silicon Valley geeks who have lived in Japan (unless it turns out that I'm the only one).[1] > Based on your method to distinguish "biased" and "non-biased" > opinion, any criticism would be categorized into "biased" opinion. > You will accept only yes-men. Yes-men-acceptors (like you) cannot > be free from be biased. > > How can I prove I am "not-biased"? We don't ask you to. You have strong opinions, which make you valuable to this project. Now we would like to extend the discussion by asking some other people about their opinions. > --- > Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/ > "Introduction to I18N" > http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/ [1] I'm sure I am the only polyglot Buddhist Silicon Valley geek who has lived in Japan and Korea, sings Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian, and Georgian in a Russian chorus, and studies Gilbert & Sullivan in Yiddish, so there is a group I *can* speak for. We :-) think Unicode is beautifully designed for all of our needs, (including CJK, Cyrillic, Tibetan, Greek, Hebrew, Devanagari, Thai, Sinhala, and a few others). We are just waiting impatiently for implementations (more programming tools, keyboard layouts, fonts, and rendering), and for encodings of a few more writing systems, and the 50,000 or so variant characters for the Palman Daejangyeong (Hachiman Daizokyo, Tripitaka Koreana). We don't have any problems any more recognizing U+76F4 in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean fonts. It did take several minutes to figure out how to type one of the variations in Cangjie the first time, but we're prepared to take a little trouble now and then, considering the rewards that follow. -- Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Does your Web site work? -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
