RE: Language Tagging And Unicode

From: Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com
Date: Wed Jan 19 2000 - 08:41:30 EST


Hallo.

>So if two Chinese "font variants" exist as different characters what more
>can I say?

I can say one thing here: simplified and traditional ideographs are
completely different and, that matters, they are different in *any* font.

On the other hand, Chinese and Japanese ideographs only have minor stylistic
variants in *some* fonts (that have a more "local" style), so they have been
unified.

>Even bigger thing: A, E, O are the same in Cyrillic and Latin, yet they are
>different characters in Unicode.

and

>Can anybody now explain me the exact logic for "what is character and
what's
>not"? As far as I can see, the only real rule is "what people accept that
it
>should be a character".

You know that I don't agree with your proposal and why. However these are
very good questions, and I am very curious to see the answers from Unicode
"authorities".

My personal answer is that Unicode's architecture is not a "clean" thing,
and often one discovers that there is no "exact logic" behind many choices.

If I am honest, I must say that all the objections that I made to your
proposal are also true for A, C, E, I, J, O, P, S, and X: in Latin *and*
Cyrillic they could well be the same: there wouldn't even be any problem in
upper-/lower-casing.

Ciao.
        Marco



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