On Saturday, March 16, 2002, at 05:12 , <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have to hasten to add that I have no knowledge of Eastern classics, > unfortunately. I just jumped to the conclusion that the > above-mentioned would have been one of those cases where new Chinese > characters were created "on the fly", for artistic purposes of the > poems.
That's okay. With Unicode so large (yet not even large enough to spell everyone's name correct), we can't help winding up like blind people touching an Elephant, trying tell what it is. I just wanted to point out that Kanji is enbedded with capacity to create characters "on the fly". And doing so is a popular game in Japan. There is even a game like scribble but in this case you put Bushu instead of letters. So allowing a given Kanji for an official use is more like allowing a new word to a dictionary. And the whole discussion of Tengwar sounds to me like Webster, Oxford, or American Heritage should add "kwijibo" into their vocabulary because Bart Simpson has used (I am relieved to find there is no "Unidict" !) How many Kanji sould be allowed in official use has been (and will ever be) a good question in CJK society. And it swings between reductionists and expansionists time by time. There was even a proposal in Japan, right after the defeat of WWII, to make English the official language to get rid of Kanji but this idea never got popular enough. I have heard that Koreans, once try to get rid of Kanji in favor of Hangul, is begging to teach their children Kanji again because Kanji is better suited to represent words with same pronunciation. And one (Continental) Chinese told me that the Chinese Government suspended further Kanji simplification so they can smoothly "reclaim Taiwan" :) Dan the Man with a Compromised Name
