Re: Is it true that Unicode is insufficient for Oriental languages?

From: Theodore H. Smith (delete@elfdata.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 08:51:10 EDT

  • Next message: Marco Cimarosti: "RE: Is it true that Unicode is insufficient for Oriental language s?"

    Hi John,

    Thanks for clarifying this. Unfortunately this seems to be the lot with
    Unicode. Much misinformation flying around the internet!

    I really do think Unicode.org could gain from getting an additional
    section, and a redesign'ed website. A simpler description for people
    who just want some kind of a background, instead of just for
    implementors.

    I KNOW you are going to say you already have this, but I have looked
    over your website, and it's not as simple and "newbie friendly" as
    something like
    www.w3schools.com is.

    w3schools is a perfect example of making complex technologies
    accessible to newbies. Hows about a unicodeschools.com, eh? (Hopefully
    domain name spammers haven't taken it).

    > The claim that the CJK-using countries were not involved in Unicode/
    > ISO 10646 is simply false. They, through their various national
    > standards bodies, have been deeply involved since the beginning.
    >
    > Also, the claims that "full literacy" requires knowledge of all the
    > ancient character forms (10,000 and up) is as silly as the claim that
    > full literacy in English requires one to be able to read Beowulf, and
    > perhaps Cicero too, in the original.
    >
    > The details of the Han unification scheme were devised precisely by
    > experts from and in the relevant countries. It was not imposed on
    > Unicode by "the West".
    >
    > The author of this diatribe does not understand how the non-BMP
    > characters work, or just how much space there is.
    >
    > There are no less than 70K Han characters in Unicode 4.0.

    Thats quite a lot. Personally I'm glad I only have to know 26 (x2 for
    uppercase).

    One thing though, the author mentioned that there are 5 latin sets in
    Unicode? I have noticed some replication, there is one block that looks
    like latin, just with a different font! It looked like "Old English"
    writing, but it could have been called Ogham perhaps, or maybe my
    memory fails me.

    That really is a bad idea anyhow. I'm not sure why there is gregorian,
    either. Why can't they just use ASCII? Thats also a bad idea. 

    --
     Theodore H. Smith - Macintosh Consultant / Contractor.
     My website: <www.elfdata.com/>

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