From: Leo Broukhis (leob@mailcom.com)
Date: Mon Jan 12 2009 - 13:27:14 CST
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 6:42 AM, Curtis Clark
<jcclark-lists@earthlink.net> wrote:
> On 2009-01-11 21:34, Leo Broukhis wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 8:08 PM, Curtis Clark
>> <jcclark-lists@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> So is 犬 a precomposed glyph for いぬ?
>>
>> As a unified CJK glyph - no, because it is also present in another
>> independent writing system. If you had chosen a kanji specific to
>> Japanese, then - in absence of homonyms - it can be argued that a
>> kanji character is the precomposed glyph for a word spelled out in
>> kana that uniquely identifies that character.
>
> So if the stylized picture of a dog were used in more than one writing
> system, it could not be precomposed?
Let me first clarify that by "precomposed" I mean "precomposed and
therefore not deserving a separate codepoint".
Having said so, the answer is obvious - if a glyph is a part of a
writing system in which it does not have a decomposition, it will have
to be encoded.
> I'm guessing (I don't know) that there is a somewhat realistic Egyptian
> hieroglyph for dog; would it be a precomposed version of the demotic, since
> it is not used in another system? Or should it be unified with the emoji
> dog?
Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic writing are two separate writing
systems that were not (I believe) intermixed within a text; my
understanding of Japanese is (please correct me if I'm wrong) that one
cannot write exclusively in kanji without resorting to kana for
syntactic marking, and the same text can be written with varying
amounts of kanji in it, looking more or less educated, and more or
less esthetically pleasing, the same way as a text can be written with
or without ligatures.
> My point here is that a lot of these questions have already been addressed,
> and the answers are part of the standard.
Ok, let's look from another angle. Does the standard say when a
picture of a dog used within a Japanese text stops being a cute
fantasy font glyph variant of 犬 and starts being a separate character?
Leo
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