From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Nov 18 2002 - 16:37:36 EST
James Kass said:
> How do these differences apply to Unicode plain text and the
> Plane 14 tags? For example, it was noted that the ideographic full
> stop is centered in Chinese text but sits on the baseline (and isn't
> centered) in Japanese text.
This claim about ideographic periods is untrue. Chinese typography
uses both conventions. Older, traditional typography (but still
already Western-adapted in using horizontal layout) uses the
centered ideographic full stops (e.g., 1971 dictionary published
in Taipei). Modern typography uses the baseline, left-set ideographic
full stops (e.g., 1997 simplified Chinese dictionary published in Beijing,
2002 simplified Chinese newspaper published in Burlingame, California!).
It is a matter of typographic style and historic period, *not* of
language.
*Really* traditional classical Chinese text doesn't use an ideographic full
stop at all. Typical material might be set vertically, with left
sidelining serving the highlighting function that bolding or italics
would do in Latin text, and with furigana-style punctuation dropped
in annotationally on the right side of the vertical lines of text.
[Just to make things difficult, *that* Chinese, while still Chinese,
is clearly a distinct language from modern (Mandarin) Chinese, as
distinct from it as Chaucer's "English" is from modern (American)
English.]
> Without a plain text method of distinguishing the writing system
> for a run of text, a plain text file wouldn't be able to be
> correctly displayed if it had both Japanese and Chinese text.
Of course it would.
Go to any Japanese newspaper. There is no required change of
typographic style when Chinese names and placenames are mentioned
in the context of Japanese articles about China.
Go to any Chinese newspaper. There is no required change of
typographic style when Japanese names and placenames are mentioned
in the context of Chinese articles about Japan.
These is completely comparable to the fact that my local
English-language newspaper doesn't need a German language tag
to write Gerhard Schroeder.
--Ken
> (Ideographic variants notwithstanding.)
>
> Best regards,
>
> James Kass.
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Nov 18 2002 - 17:21:11 EST