On Saturday, March 16, 2002, at 05:12 , <jarkko.hietaniemi@nokia.com>
wrote:
> I have to hasten to add that I have no knowledge of Eastern classics,
> unfortunately. I just jumped to the conclusion that the
> above-mentioned would have been one of those cases where new Chinese
> characters were created "on the fly", for artistic purposes of the
> poems.
That's okay. With Unicode so large (yet not even large enough to
spell everyone's name correct), we can't help winding up like blind
people touching an Elephant, trying tell what it is.
I just wanted to point out that Kanji is enbedded with capacity to
create characters "on the fly". And doing so is a popular game in
Japan. There is even a game like scribble but in this case you put
Bushu instead of letters.
So allowing a given Kanji for an official use is more like allowing a
new word to a dictionary. And the whole discussion of Tengwar sounds to
me like Webster, Oxford, or American Heritage should add "kwijibo" into
their vocabulary because Bart Simpson has used (I am relieved to find
there is no "Unidict" !)
How many Kanji sould be allowed in official use has been (and will
ever be) a good question in CJK society. And it swings between
reductionists and expansionists time by time. There was even a proposal
in Japan, right after the defeat of WWII, to make English the official
language to get rid of Kanji but this idea never got popular enough. I
have heard that Koreans, once try to get rid of Kanji in favor of
Hangul, is begging to teach their children Kanji again because Kanji is
better suited to represent words with same pronunciation. And one
(Continental) Chinese told me that the Chinese Government suspended
further Kanji simplification so they can smoothly "reclaim Taiwan" :)
Dan the Man with a Compromised Name
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Mar 15 2002 - 14:59:59 EST