RE: Term Asian is not used properly on Computers and NET

From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Tue May 29 2001 - 15:46:09 EDT


On 05/29/2001 12:55:19 PM Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>But, if by "East Asian" you mean "languages written with Han ideographs",
>you fall in another pitfall, because Mongolian, Russian, Vietnamese and
many
>other languages spoken in East Asia aren't accounted for.

At least in academic contexts, or at least in linguistics, I'm sure I have
seen "East Asia" used to mean primarily Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Vietnam is considered Southeast Asia rather than East Asia. Russian isn't
exclusively East Asian, and would more likely be associated with Eastern
Europe, I think. Monglian, and Yi for that matter, are potential issues
here, but again, in practice I wonder how many users would think of East
Asian as anything beyond CJK.

>Personally, I got used to the acronym CJK and, so far, I haven't met many
>people who are so "ordinary" not to understand the explanation that "CJK"
>means "Chinese/Japanese/Korean".

I haven't met anybody who couldn't understand an explanation of "CJK", but
outside people in our limited sphere, I find a lot of people (including
linguists) don't know what "CJK" means. Keep in mind, this started out as
a discussion of how to label a control in a dialog of a major commercial
application used by millions of ordinary users. You go tell the UI
designers, help-file authors, training and support people that they need to
label the control "CJK" and then explain it to people.

- Peter

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:18:17 EDT