Ben Monroe wrote:
> While I lived in Japan, I always wrote my last name with 龍 stuck
> inside of 門 (in the space in the lower middle).
Of course, anyone can do that -- Han is known to be a productive system
and people have alyways played games with characters for fun and
scholarship and poetic license. Over a long period of time that is
precisely what generates tens of thousands of all-but-meaningless
characters and microvariants that form part of the enormous and
ever-increasing "Han baggage" that is carried through the millenia. I'm not
knocking the system -- it's great, but...
The correct solution, if one merely wanted to be able to express all
possible nuances of micro-variable strokes, would have been to provide a
few hundreds of pieces and compose Han charcaters on the fly.
Unfortunately, no system has ever done that, and it runs counter to all
notions of standardized text processing. It would not EASE anything, it
would merely translate the realm of hand-written ambiguity wholesale into
strings in the computer and lead to even greater problems. In any system
that has ever utilized a fixed set of entities, each "zu" has always been
separately enumerated and variants are typically cross-referenced. This
applies to moveable type and computer sets and entries in a dictionary.
It's inescapable. But just because the system is so productive does not
mean that every possible permutation of every possible stroke must be
encoded -- just the ones that are meaningful enough to win the Darwinian
struggle for standardization.
> And do I win the prize? (I can document a year's worth of school
> work, notes, tests, and a personal seal using this spelling.)
For what it's worth: a personal seal isn't acceptable "proof" of anything.
I have several personal seals, and anyone can get a pesonal seal for a few
bucks. The kindly gent at any local hanko shop would be delighted to carve
anything under the sun.
But, if you can go down to your local kuyakusho and legally register your
seal and mail me a notarized copy of the registration, that would be worth
framing. Better yet, apply for Japanese citizenship and mail me a copy of
your kokuseki touhon when you're all registered...
Rick
