Re: Is it true that Unicode is insufficient for Oriental languages?

From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 08:04:41 EDT

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    Theodore H. Smith scripsit:

    > It says that Unicode is insufficient for Oriental languages. This is
    > mostly at the bottom of the page, where it says some characters are
    > left out.

    The claim that the CJK-using countries were not involved in Unicode/
    ISO 10646 is simply false. They, through their various national
    standards bodies, have been deeply involved since the beginning.

    Also, the claims that "full literacy" requires knowledge of all the
    ancient character forms (10,000 and up) is as silly as the claim that
    full literacy in English requires one to be able to read Beowulf, and
    perhaps Cicero too, in the original.

    The details of the Han unification scheme were devised precisely by
    experts from and in the relevant countries. It was not imposed on
    Unicode by "the West".

    The author of this diatribe does not understand how the non-BMP
    characters work, or just how much space there is.

    There are no less than 70K Han characters in Unicode 4.0.

    -- 
    "Do I contradict myself?                        John Cowan
    Very well then, I contradict myself.            jcowan@reutershealth.com
    I am large, I contain multitudes.               http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
            --Walt Whitman, _Leaves of Grass_       http://www.reutershealth.com
    


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