Andrew C. West <andrewcwest at alumni dot princeton dot edu> wrote:
>> And if you think that's bad, you should have seen the ones that got
>> rejected -- special "emphasized" Hangul for writing the names of
>> North Korean dictators
>
> Not so outlandish as it may first appear. When Egyptian hieroglyphs
> get encoded in Unicode, I would not be surprised to see special
> characters for the cartouched names of pharaohs (for pharaohs read
> dictators).
>
> And in China, historically the personal names of emperors (for
> emperors read dictators) have been tabooed (some dynasties, e.g. Han,
> Song and Qing, more than others), meaning that if you had to write a
> character that happened to be part of the emperor's personal name,
> then you either substituted another character (synonym or homophone as
> appropriate), or wrote the character with the last stroke omitted.
> This later practice was prevalent during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).
The Egyptian pharaohs and Chinese emperors were generally viewed as gods
or demigods. It's not too surprising to see the names of supreme beings
written in a special way. In the Hebrew tradition, the name of God
(Yahweh) is written specially to avoid the appearance of blasphemy.
Mark Shoulson and Michael Everson co-wrote a draft proposal in 1998 to
encode the "Tetragrammaton" in Unicode:
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1740/n1740.htm
But in 2002, political leaders and heads of state are more likely to be
seen as human, rather than superhuman, at least in most cultures, and to
have their names written with the same characters as the common folk.
For the North Koreans to encode special "emphasized" Hangul characters
for the names of their two "Great Leaders," Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il,
in their national standard -- going so far as to encode separate
characters for "Kim" and "Il" for each leader, though the two were
father and son -- and to propose these "emphasized" characters for
ISO/IEC 10646, seems extremely backward and/or extremely repressive, at
least to this Westerner.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
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