Re: [tlug] Re: Unicode

[Charles Muller <acmuller@example.com>]

Simon Colston wrote:

> I have to agree with this.  If you want to create a Japanese-Chinese
> dictionary in Unicode then there need to be separate codes for each
> character that looks the same to a Westerner's eyes but very different to
> the Japanese and Chinese. 

I am creating such a dictionary, and I can tell you that it is *not*
necessary to create a separate code point for every minor variation in
character form, since these differences can easily be represented by font
changes. If there were a different code point for every minor variant in
glyph shape, it would actually be impossible to create a coherent and
systematic code set. 

Regarding sensitivity to the issue, Westerners who are doing in-depth
specialist research on Chinese characters quite commonly bring an acute
awareness to these issues that exceeds that of the average East Asian.

> I think a lack of sensitivity to these types of
> problem are a bigger problem than a "nationalistic" desire to have one's
> own language look like one's own language.

There (again) seems to be a perception here that the Hanzi (Kanji) portion of Unicode was
put together by Westerners without knowledge/approval of the East Asian
countries. This is incorrect. The content of the Hanzi area--even of Unicode
1.0--was hammered out in long meetings in Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing, the
committees being comprised of literary experts and IT professionals from
those fields in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, etc. The
inconsistencies in the final decisions on handling certain types of variants
are the result of compromises that needed to be made just to get things
finished. The people in the Unicode consortium got the process going, and
were able to wrap it up with the various compromises that went into the
various stages of Unicode, but again, as I tried to point out in my first
message on this topic: the commonly purveyed misperception that the current
character set was foisted on Easterners by Westerners is quite
untrue.

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/]
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