I've changed the Subject: header because this thread is diverging.
On Saturday, March 16, 2002, at 11:43 , Thomas Chan wrote:
> This particular case in a Chinese context wouldn't be respected.
One of the strongest taboo in business correspondence in Asia is to
misspell names. (Thanks to | Because of) the ever-growing need for the
e-mails, the resent toward misspelled names seems decreasing but it is
still considered rude.
As for the reason why there are 31 different watanabes allowed while
classical 'Dan' is not is history. Family names followed the
conventions of pre-WWII rule that "Written form is correct" so the
Japanese government registered those of which considered bogus according
to dictionaries. After WWII, the rule has changed to limit the number
of kanjis allowed for names that are given thereafter.
Then will the problem fade as old generations pass away? Not unless
Japan changes Ko-seki (the Registry of Family). In Japan, Ko-seki is
the mother of all personal identification. Your passport, driver's
license, and the resident registration (Ju-min-hyo), all demands Koseki
and in Koseki, not only yourself but also your parents are listed. And
your parents' names must be spelled exactly as initially registered.
In other words, neither Unicode nor any portable charset to date can
be used just to issue driver's license, much less exchange legal
documents electrically. This is a serious obstacle to "digitize"
government but never discussed in depth . I hate to tell you this but I
can't even help wondering if this to keep outdated engineers and
companies happy by letting them manage proprietary character sets :(
> However,
> if one is to pick over little details, then I still don't know what
> U+5F3E
> is (in the context of Dan's name)--does the upper right corner have two
> or
> three strokes?
Three. That's the only official 'Dan' with 'Bow' and 'Single' in
Modern Japanese. Two stroke form is for Simplified Chinese and two
mouths Traditional.
When I was in Dalien, People's Republic of China, my name was on the
cooporate we page with two strokes but on my name card two mouths form
was used. So in a way all of which is correct. Or, there are actually
3 more at least; The one in Katakana and Hiragana (Two letters; da-n),
and D-A-N.
Dan or U+5F3E
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