Hi, At Sun, 5 May 2002 19:12:31 -0400 (EDT), Jungshik Shin wrote:
> > I believe that you are kidding to say about such a limitation. > > Japanese language has much less vowels and consonants than Korean, > > which results in much more homonyms than Korean. Thus, I think > > Well, actually it's due to not so much the difference in > the number of consonants and vowels as the fact that Korean has > both closed and open syllables while Japanese has only open syllables > that makes Japanese have a lot more homonyms than Korean. You may be right. Anyway, the true reason is that Japanese language has a lot of words from old Chinese. These words which are not homonyms in Chinese will be homonyms in Japanese. (They may or may not be homonys in Korea. I believe that Korean also has a lot of Chinese-origin words.) Since a way to coin a new word is based on Kanji system, Japanese language would lose vitality without Kanji. > I don't think Japanese will ever do, either. However, I'm afraid > having too many homonyms is a little too 'feeble' a 'rationale' for > not being able to convert to all phonetic scripts like Hiragana and > Katakana. > ... Since I don't represent Japanese people, I don't say whether it is a good idea or not to have many homonyms. You are right, there are many other reasons for/against using Kanji and I cannot explain everything. Japanese pronunciation does have troubles, though it is widely helped by accents or rhythms. However, in some cases, none of accesnts or context can help. For example, both science and chemistry are "kagaku" in japanese. So we sometimes call chemistry as "bakegaku", where "bake" is another reading of "ka" for chemistry. Another famous confusing pair of words is "private (organization)" and "municipal (organization)", which is called "shiritu". Thus, "private" is sometimes called "watakushiritu" and "municipal" is called "ichiritu", again these alias names are from different readings of kanji. If you listen to Japanese news programs every day, you will find these examples some day. These days more and more Japanese people want to learn more Kanji to use their abundance of power of expression, though I am not one of these Kanji learners. > I also like to know whether it's possible with Xkb. BTW, if > we use three-set keyboards (where leading consonants and trailing > consonants are assigned separate keys) and use U+1100 Hangul Conjoining > Jamos, Korean Hangul input is entirely possible with Xkb alone. Note for xkb experts who don't know Hiragana/Katakana/Hangul: input methods of these scripts need backtracking. For example, in Hangul, imagine I hit keys in the c-v-c-v (c: consonant, v: vowel) sequence. When I hit c-v-c, it should represent one Hangul syllable "c-v-c". However, when I hit the next v, it should be two Hangul syllables of "c-v c-v". In Hiragana/Katakana, processing of "n" is complex (though it may be less complex than Hangul). --- 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/
