Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 15:11:46 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: frankch@waru.life.nthu.edu.tw (Chen Hsiung Chan) Cc: itojun@iijlab.net, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <199806121511.IAA08464@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19980612124245.33715@waru.life.nthu.edu.tw> from "Chen Hsiung Chan" at Jun 12, 98 12:42:45 pm
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > >The point is not a reduction in an alphabetic symbol space, as in > > >your A-F example. > > >A switch from Kanji to Kana would not damage the ability to represent > > >any Japanese words; it's a switch from an ideogrammatic to an > > >alphabetic representation. > > > > bzzzz, you are wrong. We Japnaese can't live without Kanji. > > Kanji is not an extra character sets. Kanji is mandatory > > character set for us, just like G-Z for you. Believe me, > > I speak and write Japanese every day :-) > > That's also true for Chinese. We can not live with only > phonetic symbols, whether that be bopomofo or pinyin or > anything else. This is still not valid for the A-F example. What you are complaining about is not the lack of symbols, but the lack of diacritical markings; the use of "radicals" in Kanji servers the equivalent purpose. An English analogy is the meter in poetry, which can not be represented without invented diacritical marks: - | - | - | - | The boy stood on the burning deck - | - | - | | His feet were full of blisters Alternately, you can use dipthongs (such as the "ae" in "Gilbrae") to make written kana/bopomofo/pinyan pseudo phonetic, like English. I would discourage this, for reasons previously stated, and use the less intrusive punctuational methods. For example, in written Romaji, vowel extension is generally done via hyphenated repetition: oba-san oba-a-san Romanized Chinese requires syllabic hypenation and intonational markings: / - _ Ni-hou-ma ie: it's possible to do. Definition of diacritics is (obviously, from my examples of Western markup schemas 8-)) better left to native speakers to decide. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199806121511.IAA08464>