Re: [tlug] apache2 setup and japanese charset

[Charles Muller <acmuller@example.com>]

David Oftedal 

> That's a rather funny way of unifying three alphabets, though, just 
> unifying them in an encoding and waiting for the countries to adopt it. 
> Mao couldn't have done it better. :D

There is an awful lot of history that you need to know about this before
developing this kind of understanding, which Jim, of course, knows a good
piece of. 

One very unfortunate myth that is purveyed far more in Japan
than in the other East Asian countries is the bit that Unicode was "forced on"
them by an outside organization. All the Unicode people were trying to do in
the early days, was to try to get people together to create a single
encoding standard for as many languages as possible. Because of problems
related to cultural chauvinism, they for a long time found it basically
impossible to get the Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Koreans to sit down
at the table together, and even when they finally did, there were all kinds
of ridiculous disputes over minor differences in glyph shapes that never even
needed to be dealt with at the level of encoding to begin with.

The Japanese only ended up getting on board at the end when they figured out
that if they didn't, they'd be left out completely, and even since then,
there has been almost nothing but complaint from the Japanese
end. Therefore, when it came to actually using Unicode for major text
digitization projects, while the Taiwanese and Koreans went ahead and began
to use Unicode fairly early, most major Japanese digital data projects
refused to use Unicode (as still does, for example, the monstrously funded
Japan Memory Project), and thus Japan continues to fall further behind in
these areas.

Many of my colleagues from Taiwan, Korea, and Japan were in the thick of all
this on the Unicode committees, so I have heard endless unbelievable stories
about went on in these meetings. And even my own dictionary projects were roundly criticized in Japan
for several years because I was using Unicode.

So don't let anyone make you think that the East Asian countries were given
no voice or opportunity for input in the matter.

Chuck

---------------------------
Charles Muller  <acmuller@example.com>
Faculty of Humanities,  Toyo Gakuen University
Digital Dictionary of Buddhism and CJKV-English Dictionary [http://www.acmuller.net]
H-Buddhism List Editor [http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~buddhism/]
Mobile Phone: 090-9310-1787