Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Jan 4, 2007, at 12:05, Karl Dubost wrote:
Le 4 janv. 2007 à 18:41, Henri Sivonen a écrit :
It doesn't matter much. It is rather clear that the ruby markup is
intended for a particular Chinese and Japanese typographical device.
You'd use the markup whenever you want to use that typographical
device. Bothering authors with what they profoundly mean when they
use the typographical device isn't particularly helpful.
Furigana is an annotation system.
And essential for learning the language at school.
Or read the kanjis that are too difficult to be known when browsing.
Right, but my point is that authors will use the ruby markup when they
want the furigana typographic effect. It isn't helpful to insist on a
particular semantic scope like, for example, requiring the ruby base to
be considered "difficult kanji".
Right. I have even seen cases where ruby is used to annotate English words
(base) with Japanese Kanji (ruby):
http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/directions/scans/genji2
Ruby is a nifty annotation system if you want to mark up words in parallel,
as for pronunciation, or word-by-word translation, or grammatical labelling,
etc. The key difference from other annotation systems is that it can be
word-for-word without being awkward. (Imagine doing this with footnotes.)
~fantasai
