Jonathan Rosenne wrote:
>Martin J Duerst wrote:
>>No character standard can solve the problem that new characters get
>>created.
>
>Coding radicals and composition go a long way to help solve this problem.
Hello Jonathan,
You wrote something similar previously, and I thought about answering,
but had no time. But now I think I better should write a few things.
Radical composition techniques can indeed describe a large percentage
of Chinese characters. Within the daily used ones, it's maybe 80%-90%,
within Unicode, it's maybe 95%. The percentage gets higher as you include
rarer characters. The percentage may also be somewhat higher (maybe
also lower, but I doubt it) for characters made up for names.
What is more important, however, is that there is always a remaining
percentage cannot be coded with radical composition techniques.
Of course, you can introduce new composition operators, but this is
not very productive. For example, in a list of about 50'000 characters
from the largest Japanese dictionary (Morohashi), there are I think
three characters that contain a component turned upside-down
(i.e. rotated 180 degrees).
So maybe these techniques "go a long way", but they don't solve
the problem.
Regrads, Martin.
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