i18n

[Nicholas Bodley]

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 01:01:09 -0500, Robert La Ferla  
<robertlaferla at comcast.net> wrote:
[...]

> and UTF-16 are also used.  I am a big fan of UTF-8 because it supports  
> multiple languages (East Asian, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, English, etc...)  
> and efficiently handles ASCII (as single bytes.)

Indeed! It seems that any e-mail client that can't handle it gracefully  
should be updated or replaced. I did study, somewhat, how it works, and  
it's quite clever.

> A great resource on this subject is the book, "CJKV Information  
> Processing" by Ken Lunde.

Amazing book. V is Vietnamese. The unique Vn. Chu Nom writing system was  
used for about nine centuries, and apparently much fine literature was  
written with it. Last time I checked, so to speak, only a few dozen people  
could write it (iirc), and only a few hundred worldwide can read it. Just  
how badly endangered it is, I don't know. Superficially, it looks like  
Chinese, but it seems that characters  are written in pairs, one for  
sound, one for meaning.

The book about the Fifth Generation Project of some years ago has an  
excellent, concise description of the Japanese written language.

> Both Katakana (foreign words) and Hiragana (native Japanese words) are  
> phonetic so they are easy to learn.  Kanji is also interesting but to be  
> > literate you need to learn a few thousand characters which is quite a  
> task.

Quite a task, indeed. Japan has defined a subset called something like  
Johyoh Kanji (Tohyoh, earlier? Don't let me confuse matters!) that numbers  
around 2,200 or so, and (except for personal names) its use is strongly  
encouraged, as I understand it. Youngsters have a big job, learning the  
characters; seems that they learn a few hundred per year. Nevertheless,  
once one learns, it seems that text meaning is particularly vivid.  
Converting it to kana or alphabetic script seems to put it "out of focus",  
according to one comment.

Afaik, katakana is used for legal documents, because kanji is more open to  
interpretation.

Around 1992, when we had a local recession, I spent a good bit of time in  
the Waltham library (I used to live almost next to it) with a free  
ad-supported Japanese-language weekly (?) thatI got at Yoshinoya on  
Prospect St., just N. of Central Sq. in Cambridge. (The Nelson Dictionary  
of Japanese has a better way of looking up kanji; there are may ways.)  
After "decoding" a good lot of katakana, I noticed that a certain kanji  
always followed the katakana form of "Massachusetts". Surely enough, it  
meant "state". That helped whet my interest in kanji, and I started to try  
translating Japanese text. In general, it took me maybe half an hour per  
sentence, and even then, I wasn't necessarily sure of what I'd decided was  
the meaning.

kanji (Jp.) is equiv. to hanzi (Ch.) and hanja (Ko.); all have the same  
meaning.

As to hardware, fax got a boost apparently because Japanese businesses  
like to communicate by handwritten messages; people who write nicely are  
appreciated. (This might be outdated; I don't know.) As well, it takes a  
minimum of about 24 pins in a dot matrix (wire impact printer) to render  
acceptable complex kanji. Although I might never have read anything to  
that effect, it seems to me that this consideration pushed the development  
of 24-"pin" printers.

However, I mustn't stay off-topic too long or too far.

Best regards,

-- 
Nicholas Bodley  /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
Teaching [creationism and evolution] suggests
teaching [alchemy and chemistry], as well as
[astrology and astronomy]. (Physics, though?)
(Credit to Richard Cohen, Wash. Post, 20060309)