On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>"Traditional Chinese" and "Simplified Chinese" are *not* two different
>languages.
But they are naturally handled as such, no? After all, they employ the
same Unicode codepoints but are displayed in a different font altogether.
>The TC/SC distinction is an artifact of legacy choices made for encoding
>characters and implementation of text in East Asian computer systems. It
>is *not* a language distinction, and should not be tagged as such.
But there are distinguishable dialectal differences between the variants
of the base Chinese language used between the areas which primarily
utilize Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Hence, even if they are not
treated as separate languages, one cannot do a codepoint-for-codepoint
transformation and end up with legible text. This sort of distinction
*should* be tagged as a dialect variant, if I'm not incorrect altogether.
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Oct 17 2001 - 17:41:08 EDT