Re: Level of Unicode support required for various languages

From: vunzndi@vfemail.net
Date: Fri Oct 26 2007 - 12:14:55 CDT

  • Next message: James Kass: "Re: Level of Unicode support required for CJKV"

    Quoting David Starner <prosfilaes@gmail.com>:

    > On 10/26/07, David Starner <prosfilaes@gmail.com> wrote:
    >> Are there a significant
    >> number of characters that would rarely see print today even in
    >> scholarly editions of old works? That's the convention used for other
    >> works.
    >
    > This was less than clear; let me try again.
    >
    > Are there a significant number of Han ideographs in Extension A that
    > would rarely see print today even in scholarly editions of old works?

    Yes. I estimate over 500.

    According to Unihan.txt 1225 characters in extension A are not in the
    Kangxi Dictionary (IRGKangXi ...1) which means they are not likely to
    be in ancient Chinese documents, but less than 200 simplified variants
    of any kind. Which suggests there are maybe over 1000 characters in
    extension A that one would rarely find in print today even in
    scholarly editions of old works! (This is a very crude estimate but
    accurate to a factor of two, so say that means at least 500 very
    obscure characters)

    > The rest of the world's scholars have the scripts they use encoded in
    > the BMP and counted as modern use--albeit because they mostly write in
    > Latin (Gothic, Cuniforme, etc.), Greek, Cyrillic, or Hebrew (most
    > Semetic writings), probably Arabic and Devanagari, scripts that are in
    > modern use and can be included in the BMP in whole.
    >
    >

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