Masataka Ohta <mohta at necom830 dot hpcl dot titech dot ac dot jp>
wrote:
Masataka Ohta <mohta at necom830 dot hpcl dot titech dot ac dot jp>
wrote:
"at"? "dot"?
I tried to obfuscate your e-mail address from bots that search the
Web-based archives. I do this to everyone. Sorry if it was confusing.
since most computers sold all over the world now
come with at least one perfectly good Unicode-based font with
Chinese-style glyphs and another with Japanese-style glyphs.
Now, you admit that the problem does exist.
I admit there are stylistic differences between the way the *same
characters* are written in the Chinese and Japanese traditions. Anyone
who knows about East Asian writing knows that. I do not admit there is
a problem with unifying them in a character-based (not glyph-based)
encoding.
I can't print Japanese characters in China where Chinese-style
glyphs are used by default.
No, you can't print Japanese *glyphs* in that situation. Characters and
glyphs are not the same thing.
With both Chinese and Japanese glyphs are available, ISO 2022 works
perfectly fine with corresponding Chinese and Japanese character
sets. On the other hand, language tags are useless from the beginning
to distinguish characters. One can represent some content in Japanese
language by ASCII, Japanese characters or Chinese characters.
If you (or your software) can use the distinction between ISO 2022-JP
and Big-5, or EUC-TW, or CNS 11643, or whatever to determine whether to
display Japanese or Chinese glyphs, you (or your software) can do the
same by using the distinction between "ja" and "zh". If you can use ISO
2022 controls to switch between "the Japanese repertoire" and "the
Chinese repertoire," you can do the same with language tags. This is a
question of style, not legibility.
If you are saying—I'm not sure about this—that the same ISO 10646 code
point needs to be displayed in both the Japanese and Chinese glyphic
traditions in the same Japanese-langauge text, and that only ISO 2022 is
adequate to indicate which glyphs to display, then I ask: how is this
problem solved in handwritten text?
I think you do your countrymen a disservice by claiming that they are
incapable of reading kanji printed in a Chinese-style font.
Red herring.
Just as most native users of Latin alphabet can read Greek alphabet,
most Japanese can read Chinese glyphs, which is not the point at all.
Actually I think you are being too kind to most native users of the
Latin alphabet. They can certainly read Greek Α, because the Latin A is
derived from it. They might get terribly confused by Greek Η and Ρ and
Χ, which are not equivalent to the Latin letters they resemble—unless,
of course, they are familiar with the use of Greek letters in
professional or fraternal organizations, which is its own red herring.
Most scholars of writing systems disagree with your premise that Chinese
hanzi and Japanese kanji are two separate writing systems in the same
way that Latin and Greek are separate. Latin and Greek are not simply
glyph variants of one another.
You should admit that ISO 10646 useless for internationalization.
I do not. ISO 10646 is a cornerstone of modern software
internationalization.
I imagine this is off-topic for IETF.
--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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