Re: The result of the Plane 14 tag characters review

From: Thomas Chan (tc31@cornell.edu)
Date: Mon Nov 18 2002 - 21:01:54 EST

  • Next message: Andy White: "RE: Extending the semantics of ZWJ and ZWNJ for Indic scripts"

    On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Michael Everson wrote:

    > At 13:37 -0800 2002-11-18, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
    > >Go to any Japanese newspaper. There is no required change of
    > >typographic style when Chinese names and placenames are mentioned
    > >in the context of Japanese articles about China.
    > >Go to any Chinese newspaper. There is no required change of
    > >typographic style when Japanese names and placenames are mentioned
    > >in the context of Chinese articles about Japan.
    >
    > Just to be sure: this means that when a Japanese newspaper it uses
    > the glyphs its readers prefer for Chinese names, not glyphs which
    > Chinese readers may prefer? Does this extend to the
    > Simplified/Traditional instance, so that if a Chinese name has the
    > word for horse in it, it uses the Japanese glyph for horse,not either
    > the S or T version of the glyph (assuming for the sake of argument
    > that both occur and that both are different from the preferred
    > Japanese glyph)?

    Yes. Not only are Japan's preferred's glyphs used, but the actual
    characters are changed, if necessary. e.g., the famous eighteenth-century
    Chinese novel, _Hongloumeng_ (Dream of Red Chamber), is studied in Japan,
    where it is known as _Kouroumu_. In TC, one writes U+7D05 U+6A13 U+5922
    for the title, while in SC, U+7EA2 U+697C U+68A6--all three characters are
    different. Searching on "Japanese pages only" at Google for the TC form,
    I only find 153 matches, whereas the actual Japanese form of the title,
    U+7D05 U+697C U+5922, which differs from the TC in the second character
    (or, to look at it in another way, differs from SC in all but the second
    character), finds 2,730 matches.

    Granted, looking only at electronically-stored instances has its flaws,
    such as the limitations of legacy character sets, but since both U+6A13
    (form of second character used in TC) and U+697C (actual second character
    used in the Japanese form of the title) are available in a Japanese
    character set, the choice of the latter is clearly a deliberate choice.

    Thomas Chan
    tc31@cornell.edu



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Nov 18 2002 - 21:56:34 EST