At 9:21 AM -0700 5/30/01, Carl W. Brown wrote:
>Sorry,
>
>Han or Hanzi is not adequate to cover Korean. If you want to get
>picky I am sure that most people are aware that there are Chinese
>minority languages for example that use other fonts. Typically the
>term CJK works for most of us. Those that don't understand the term
>generally are not familiar with issues.
>
>With Unicode you don't have the MBCS issues. What is left are more
>subtle issues. You could call them East Asian fonts as long as you
>distinguished then from Southeast Asian fonts which,except for
>Vietnamese, are more like Indic fonts.
>
>Carl
[sigh] There is no such thing as "the correct names" for anything. If
people agree to use names in the same way, we have achieved
something, and if the names reflect the structure of the things in
question even a little, we have achieved a lot.
The names "Europe" and "Asia" are accidents of Greek history and
culture passed down for more than two millennia, not real geographic
divisions, and certainly not linguistic divisions. Europe was the
Greek territories to the west of the Bosporus (+barbarians), and Asia
was the Greek territories to the east of the Bosporus (+barbarians).
I like to use the term "Han characters" to refer to the characters
that came down to us from the Han, plus their ancestors back to the
oracle bones and other characters created later on within the same
tradition. This includes PRC Simplified and Vietnamese Chu Nom, but
not other characters used in various writing systems alongside the
Han characters: Zhuyin, Hangul, Kana, Western (Arabic/Hindu)
numerals, punctuation, etc. I prefer not to write or speak of Han
scripts. I am willing to use "CJK" or "CJKV" for writing systems that
make (or used to make) essential use of Han characters, even though
both terms are seriously inaccurate. I prefer not to use geographical
terms for linguistic ideas, except in the rare cases, like India,
where the geographic boundaries were drawn to match linguistic
divisions (based in their case, on religious divisions). I do not
expect anybody in particular to agree with me on these usages, and
you can talk to me if you have A Better Idea[TM].
YMMV.
>-----Original Message-----
>From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org
>[mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On Behalf Of N.R.Liwal
>Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2001 11:11 AM
>To: unicode@unicode.org
>Subject: RECOMMENDATIONs( Term Asian is not used properly on
>Computers and NET)
>
>TERM ASIA IN COMPUTER & INTERNET (RECOMMENDATIONS UNICODE LIST "MAY 2001")
>
>So far the recomendations are, that "Asian Text Fonts" can be called:
>-Han Fonts or Hanzi Fonts
>-"East Asian Unified" Fonts
>-"East Asian" Fonts
Urghh.
Chinese fonts
Korean fonts
Japanese fonts
Chu Nom fonts
etc. fonts
CJK fonts
Unicode fonts
>Script Can be classified as:
>-languages which Han ideographs
>-'ideographic languages' SCRIPT
>-"East Asian Unified" SCRIPT
>- "East Asian" SCRIPT
Urghh. Urghh.
Traditional Chinese writing system (Han with numerals, punctuation,
etc., with or without Zhuyin)
Simplified Chinese writing system (similarly)
Korean writing system (Hangul with or without Hanja, but with numerals, etc.)
Japanese writing system (Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, numerals, symbols, etc.)
In each case with the possibility of adding Latin alphabet (Pinyin,
romaji) and perhaps Cyrillic and Greek.
As I said earlier, there are no correct names except possibly by agreement.
>Asian geographic expressions are better:
>-"Southeast Asia", "East Asia" "CENRAL ASIA"
>"WEST ASIA = Arabic Countries and Neighborhood"
>
Triple Urghh.
Have you ever heard the term "granfaloon"? The only association
between location and language is *political*, and there is no nation
without "minorities".
Let us speak with moderate precision of "languages usually or
sometimes written in Arabic script" or "...Indic scripts" and the
like. Please.
>Thanks to all who participated in discussion:
You're certainly welcome.
>
>N.R.Liwal
>Asiaosft
><http://www.liwal.net>www.liwal.net
[snip]
--Edward Cherlin Generalist "A knot!" exclaimed Alice. "Oh, do let me help to undo it." Alice in Wonderland
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