Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "jb" == Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com> writes:

    jb> They would most likely have been kanji-enabled from the
    jb> outset.

Uh-uh.  Look at history.

    jb> If not, they would have been kana-enabled from the outset,
    jb> with kanji following as soon after that as technically
    jb> possible.

This is what happened.  But had the initiative come from the East,
possibly the whole thing would have been postponed for much longer, as
the Japanese and Chinese might very well have fixated on Han
characters, making the initial hurdle much higher (remember, you need
four to ten times the display resolution for kanji that you do for the
uppercase Roman alphabet).

    jb> As a result, we would have far fewer problems with
    jb> m17n today.

I think the real hope for M17N is the fact that compared to working
with Asian languages, doing M17N with European languages only is
relatively easy, and we have standards (Unicode and POSIX locales) to
shoot down and replace with something better.  Compare the approaches
of Mule and POSIX or X.  True, Mule is much more multilingual, but it
does nothing to encourage translation to new languages; it provides no
framework for that.  Rather, it encourages each project to do it
differently.

I also don't see the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese cooperating on
M17N if it isn't imposed from the outside (if they hadn't participated
in Unicode/UCS, Xerox, MS, and ANSI would have done it to them, making
it much worse).  At least for the Europeans, the languages of the
dominant nations all fit into ISO-8859-1 and _one_ byte.  I can't see
the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans (not to mention the Vietnamese and
Taiwanese) quietly getting together and creating Unified Han in two
bytes (look at the sound and fury created when that was enforced from
the outside), nor do I see them being willing to jump to 3 or 4 bytes.

-- 
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