On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> Dan Kogai wrote:
> > How can you be so sure that "Most Japanese disagree"? Have you
> > actually taken a poll?
>
> Of course nobody has run an opinion poll among the general populace,
> and the results of such a poll would be irrelevant anyway, since
> Unicode isn't a general civil policy for the population to decide,
> but a technical standard relevant to software (and database) implementation
> and design -- and one which impacts primarily the IT specialists.
Not that I'm for an opinion poll among the general populace, but
if such a poll is ever to be taken, I think ISO 10646 CJK Ideograph table
would do much more justice to Unicode/ISO 10646 than TUS 3.0 code table.
Most people (who have heard and bought , without giving much thought
or any extensive evidence, arguements about inadquacy of Unicode/ISO
10646 or Japanese cultural identity compromised by Han Unification)
would realize that the issue was inflated far out of proportion on
skimming over the table in ISO 10646.
> Amendment 5 to 10646 was the culmination
> of the comic opera which resulted in 11,172 Hangul syllables in
> the standard, despite the fact that everyone knew that that was
> insufficient for Old Korean, and that combining jamo would have
> to be used for that, anyway.
I can't agree with you more on this. A very clear example of
the incompetence and short-sightedness of Korean nat'l standard body which
vehemently pushed it thru. Arguably this significantly delayed support
of Middle Korean (on most platforms and by most programs) by blinding
most developers to the fact that Hangul, too, needs to be treated like
Indic/Thai and other complex scripts because 'modern day-to-day' needs
are fulfilled by 11,172 precomposed Hangul syllables. Much more arguably,
having only 2,350 Hangul syllables (for the sake of compatibilty with
legacy KS X 1001) might have sped up a little support of other complex
scripts in some cases.
Jungshik Shin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Mar 20 2002 - 21:51:46 EST