Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 23:29:34 +0200 From: Stefan Eggers <seggers@semyam.dinoco.de> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: seggers@semyam.dinoco.de Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <199806122129.XAA25486@semyam.dinoco.de> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 12 Jun 1998 12:42:45 %2B0800." <19980612124245.33715@waru.life.nthu.edu.tw>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > >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. At this point I was imaging someone suggesting it the other way round to English speaking people. ;-) Even assuming it would be advantage- ous in the long run for some good reason (lets assume this reason does exist) a complete switch will be at least a long, long time away because people don't want to give up the old way of using their own language. Guess why the "Rechtschreibreform" (where there are some rather small changes to the writing taught in school) gets so much opposition in Germany. The old version probably won't die before the last person who learned it dies. And your suggestion is even more extreme than just changing the spelling of a few words. > > bzzzz, you are wrong. We Japnaese can't live without Kanji. > > Kanji is not an extra character sets. Kanji is mandatory > That's also true for Chinese. We can not live with only > phonetic symbols, whether that be bopomofo or pinyin or Would be very hard to read for me with the ambiguities. It's hard enough to learn reading it with Chinese characters. :-( Anyway, as long as there are good and easy to use converters from the representation FreeBSD uses from and to Big5, GB, ISO 2022, Unicode and others in the base system and the complete system (including syscons/pcvt) gets converted I think I can live with the result. For practical reasons I'd prefer a fixed length of a character. The software has to be written and modified by someone and for most of the FreeBSD system software and ports collections this is people who use ISO 646, ISO 8859 and KIOR-8. If they have to take into account variable length characters it might scare some of them away and those not scared have to deal with additional complexity. Stefan. -- Stefan Eggers Lu4 yao2 zhi1 ma3 li4, Max-Slevogt-Str. 1 ri4 jiu3 jian4 ren2 xin1. 51109 Koeln Federal Republic of Germany 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?199806122129.XAA25486>