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

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> 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.

Why should they be unwilling to use a four-byte system?  Yes, it uses more
memory and disk space, but both are so cheap now that claiming either of
those as a reason for not doing it wouldn't hold much water.  And if they
also require more processing power, the dizzying rate at which that
increases will leave us with no problem there, either. 

So those are the (readily apparent) potential negatives: you may need a more
powerful machine to deal with four-byte characters.  On the positive side, a
four-byte character system pretty much has room for everybody (if it
doesn't, we could go to five or six if necessary).  NIH is a powerful force,
and perhaps this what you're thinking of, but outside of that, why should
there be opposition to a unified four-byte character set incorporating,
among others, the entire Han set?

Jonathan

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