From: John H. Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Mon Jan 25 2010 - 17:40:21 CST
On Jan 25, 2010, at 3:10 PM, Christoph Päper wrote:
> John H. Jenkins:
>> The readings fields are intended to be primarily "what you would see if you looked this up in a dictionary," and secondarily "what you would type to input this character by itself."
>> The fields for Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and Vietnamese, however, all use the transcription system preferred by native speakers.
>
> Taking the close relationship of Unicode and ISO 10646 into account, one would expect, naively perhaps, those transcription systems to be selected from available ISO romanization standards. In the case of Japanese this would mean 3602 (loose or strict variant). This standard and similar ones, on the other hand, do not employ 10646 either, but provide graphic character representations only. (Admittedly, most of the ones I read have not been updated since the turn of the century.)
>
I deliberately said "transcription systems," because I'm not talking about romanization. We try to use what a native speaker is likely to see in a native-language dictionary. For Chinese that means we do use romanizations because alternative native systems (fanqie, bopomofo) have either died out or been relatively unsuccessful, and even native speakers use romanizations to transcribe the sounds of characters. For Korean, however, we've abandoned romanization in favor of hangul.
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John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
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