At 9:51 AM -0400 6/8/01, Thomas Chan wrote: >On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, [ISO-2022-JP] てんどうりゅうじ wrote: > >> My very simple rule of thumb for telling Japanese from Chinese is to >> look for kana. If I see even one kana, I am looking at Japanese, >> right? (Warning: A few kanji resemble katakana.) So if I see so much >> as a hiragana "to", it's Japanese, right? But sometimes there are >> stretches of many kanji. > >Yes, that rule of thumb works for most everyday cases that one'll run >into. > >However, manyougana would be classified as "Chinese" under that rule, as >well as kanbun. I'm not sure that one would want to classify the more >"deviant" (from a classical Chinese POV) and more Japanized forms of >kanbun as "Chinese". > >Have you seen hentaigana before?--that straddles the boundary between >being kanji used for transliteration/transcription and being kana. (How >would such text be encoded in Unicode, if at all?)
There are many other cases that require care. Numerous Buddhist texts used in China, Korea, and Japan are written entirely in Sanskrit, using only Han characters. For example, in Japanese pronunciation, with one Han character per syllable, <Title><Chinese>Dai Hi Shin</Chinese><Sanskrit>Dharani</Sanskrit></Title> <Body><Sanskrit> namu karatanno torayaya namu oriyaboryokichishifuraya fujisatoboya mokosatoboya mokokyarunikyaya... </Sanskrit></Body> Where the second line is Namah avalokitesvaraya bodhisatvaya mahasatvaya mahakarunikaya... Hail-to Avalokitesvara enlightenment-being great-being great-compassionate... About 2,000 characters have been used over the centuries to render Sanskrit in Chinese. Sanskrit words in Chinese or Japanese text (such as namu amidabutsu) are easy to recognize with a dictionary, but I don't know any simpler way, just as there is no trivial way to recognize Greek words like hoi polloi in Latin-alphabet transcription within Latin-alphabet text. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist "A knot!" exclaimed Alice. "Oh, do let me help to undo it." Alice in Wonderland
