On Sat, 16 Mar 2002, Dan Kogai wrote:
> For instance, there are at least 31 (official) way to spell 'Wata' of
> Watanabe, a very popular Japanse family name. Only a couple of which is
> in JIS0208-1990, one of many charsets Unicode based upon. Well, in this
This does not necessarily mean that only a couple of variants for
'Wata' is in Unicode. Understandably, JIS 0208-1990 had to limit the
number of variants forms of any given Kanji partly because its code
space is limited. Unicode/ISO 10646 has a far wider coding space than JIS
0208-1990 (94x94 coded character set) and it now has almost 10 times as
many Chinese characters(Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja) as JIS 0208-1990. Of course,
having ~ 2^21 code points available does not give IRG a greenlight to
encode any variant without unification issue.
> situation. There are so many Watanabe-sans, Saito-san, and others whose
> name cannot be spelled in Unicode.
and any of Japanese character sets, right?
Can you give a few examples after checking out Kanjis not just in BMP
but also in plane 2?
> Dan the Man whose Name was Compromised by the Japanese government (*)
>
> (*) My parents wanted me to name me ÷¥ (U+5F48), a classical form, but
> it was not listed on "the table of Kanjis allowed for names" so I was
> named U+5F3E.
Frankly speaking, I find it rather hard to understand what difference
there is between using U+5F48 and using U+5F3E in spelling your
name. They're the same character with the same meaning but with a bit of
variation in shape. However, I should be careful because this is about
one's name.
Jungshik Shin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Mar 15 2002 - 15:20:15 EST