RE: in the NEW YORK TIMES today, report of a USA patent for a met hod to make the Arabic language easier to read/write/typeset

From: Mike Ayers (mike.ayers@tumbleweed.com)
Date: Mon Mar 15 2004 - 14:50:05 EST

  • Next message: Frank Yung-Fong Tang: "RE: in the NEW YORK TIMES today, report of a USA patent for a met hod to make the Arabic language easier to read/write/typeset"

    > From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On
    > Behalf Of Frank Yung-Fong Tang
    > Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 11:16 AM

    > It seems not a very new idea. Similar idea have been used in
    > Chinese 40
    > years ago and create the differences between Simplifed Chinese And
    > Traditional Chinese.

            Really? That conflicts with my understanding, which is:

            When writing Chinese, there are certain stroke elements which, when
    written in the more flowing script of everyday usage (grass script et al.),
    closely resemble other stroke elements which use less strokes to write.
    These stroke reduced elements are substituted for the original elements.
    Also, there are certain "paired" character elements, such that one may be
    substituted for the other, and the quicker-to-write stroke reduced element
    gets substituted. I do not really understand these substitutions, but it is
    my understanding that they are intuitive to literate Chinese. These two
    "simplification" methods were formalized and standardized to become
    Simplified Chinese.

            Am I getting this wrong? I don't see the connection between organic
    change in a script and singular revolutionary change.

    /|/|ike



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Mar 15 2004 - 15:33:16 EST