From: Andrew C. West (andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu)
Date: Fri Jun 11 2004 - 07:44:36 CDT
On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 03:04:17 +0100, Michael Everson wrote:
>
> How many people use medieval CJK race-horse-name characters?
>
Actually, the famous Song dynasty female poet Li Qingzhao (1084-c.1151) invented
a board game (da3 ma3 tu2 in Chinese) which involved racing around a course in
which each square was marked with the name of one of dozens of famous horses
ancient and modern, most of which are written using idiosyncratic ideographs. I
would of thought that Michael of all people would be in favour of encoding
characters used in board games !
Depite the oft-mentioned cutesy Hong Kong race horse names, idiosyncratic
invented Han ideographs are a negligible component of the encoded CJK
repertoire. In my opinion there are thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of
ideographs that should not really have been encoded individually as they are
simply minor glyph variants, frequently only attested in a single source because
the author simply wrote the character wrongly in the first place. This is the
real issue with the over-encoding of CJKV, not the occasional race horse name.
Andrew
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