Re: "Giga Character Set": Nothing but noise

From: 11digitboy@bolt.com
Date: Sun Oct 15 2000 - 05:39:08 EDT


It seems to me that if not for that, how could anyone
make a Chinese font? Who is going to sit down and
draw a *myriad* or more characters? Since elements
recur, this reduces the amount of labour required
greatly.
......
......

[OT] Are there any character-encoding schemes that
have CENTESIMAL DIGIT TEN, CENTESIMAL DIGIT ELEVEN,
... CENTESIMAL DIGIT NINETY-NINE? I had a clock with
SEXAGESIMAL DIGITs ZERO through FIFTY-NINE on one
wheel. Then I got sick of the noise it made sometimes
and ripped the digits out. .... It seems to me that
in vertical text, what would be better than

san
zen
go
hyaku
yon
juu
hachi
nin

or

3
5
4
8
nin

would be

35
48
nin

but this is not allowed, is it?

------------

---- Jon Babcock <jon@kanji.com> wrote:
>
> "Carl W. Brown" <cbrown@xnetinc.com> wrote:
>
> > If you were to start all over again with no interest
> in
> > compatibility with existing code pages, you could
> drop the preformed
> > characters.
>
> Since I've commented about the possibility of using
> a set of less than
> 2000 or so characters to represent all Chinese
> graphs more than once
> on this mailing list over the past few years, I'll
> be brief this time.
>
> Such a system was developed nearly fifty years
> ago by Peter
> A. Boodberg, at the Department of Oriental Languages
> at the University
> of California, Berkeley. His work was based directly
> on a study of
> Chinese sources, especially the Shuowenjiezi Dictionary.
> I was
> fortunate to be able to study under Professor Boodberg
> during his last
> couple years at Berkeley, shortly before his death
> in 1972. I've
> rewritten some of his ideas and placed them on
> my web site (kanji.com)
> under the name of CHA (Chinese Hemigram Annotation).
> And because it
> is difficult to find his original writings on this
> subject, I intend
> to host a few of Boodberg's key 'cedules' soon.
>
> When I first heard about Unicode (probably in late
> 1991), I naively
> assumed that it would employ some version of the
> Boodberg approach,
> i.e., the use of a 'small' subset of Chinese from
> which the entirety
> is composed. But, as has been stated many times
> on this list, the
> preferred approach was to base the Unicode Han
> repertoire on lists of
> precomposed hanzi/hanja/kanji that were actually
> in use in computers
> and, for the most part, were sanctioned by national
> governments. This
> was natural given the fact that the details (and
> here the details mean
> everything) of a system such as the one Dr. Boodberg
> envisioned were
> probably not available to the Unicode people, not
> were they in use by
> any national, commercial, or even academic body.
> In other words, it
> would have meant that such an approach would have
> had to have been
> developed by what came to be known as the Unicode
> Consortium itself.
>
> Although difficult, I believe that within the decade,
> the composition
> of the Chinese script will be recognized and well-understood,
> and the
> option to treat each of the tens of thousands of
> Chinese graphs,
> including new ones but excluding of course the
> 300 or so unsegmentable
> wen, as a digraph that can be decomposed into hemigrams
> will be made
> available, perhaps even in Unicode.
>
> In the meantime, vis-a-vis Unicode and the Han
> repertoire, it's a case
> of 'get over it'. I had to.
>
> Jon
>
> --
> Jon Babcock <jon@kanji.com>
>

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