"John Jenkins" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Dec 23, 2003, at 4:23 PM, Christopher John Fynn wrote: > > > Remember that Unicode (not ISO 10646) was originally going to be a > > 16bit (plane > > 0 only encoding) - so I suspect CJK unification was at least partly > > due to > > space limitations.
> No, it was not. Han would have been unified even if there had been > space not to do so. & Doug Ewell wrote: > I think there was something in there about fundamental > identity of the characters as well. Thanks for the correction. BTW are the classical written languages of China & Japan more or less the same?? I understand that e.g. the Chinese Buddhist canon is also read by Japanese Buddhists without translation - so is it correct to assume that there was (/is?) more or less a common written language (at least for that kind of material) while the spoken languages were different? - Chris
